FEB Research Report KBI_1621
Author:
Abstract:
Previous research has integrated multi-echelon inventory management into the design of a responsive supply chain by the use of the guaranteed service approach. We build further upon this work by integrating the production capacity and product flow to minimize the supply chain's inventories. The production capacity is modeled with a queuing network to handle the variability of the batch production processes as well as the demand variability. We test and validate our model with adapted instances from literature and apply it to the rotavirus vaccine supply chain. This vaccine supply chain is seen as complex on the manufacturing side as well as on the distribution side. For our industrial application we show how this work is embedded in a scenario approach and the contribution of our model to evaluate a single scenario according to multiple performance indicators. For this paper, our scenarios consist of different lead time reduction programmes and varying demand levels. We demonstrate how to extract the best performing scenario.