Title: A distribution method for bullwhip reduction

Authors: Mahyar Eftekhar, Ahmad Makui, Kenth Lumsden

Addresses: No. 123, Residence Expanciel, 1 rue de la liberation, Jouy-En-Josas 78350, France. ' Industrial Engineering Department, Iran University of Science and Technology, Farjam St., Narmak, Tehran, Iran. ' Division of Logistics and transport, Department of Technology Management and Economics, Chalmers University of Technology, SE-41296, Gothenburg, Sweden

Abstract: The distortion in demand, known as the bullwhip effect, is crucial in supply chain management. On the other hand, Crossdocking is an operating strategy that moves items through flow consolidation centres (crossdocks) without putting them into storage. This logistics technique eliminates the storage and order picking functions while still allowing the system to serve its receiving and shipping functions. In this paper, the impact of crossdocking on bullwhip effect is shown. The fundamental objective in our work is to reduce the company dependency on forecasting for bullwhip reduction and introduction crossdocking as proper distribution method for bullwhip reduction.

Keywords: bullwhip effect; bullwhip reduction; crossdocking; centralised demand information; decentralised demand information; Lyapunov exponent memory; supply chain management; SCM; logistics; distribution.

DOI: 10.1504/IJECRM.2008.018810

International Journal of Electronic Customer Relationship Management, 2008 Vol.1 No.4, pp.390 - 401

Published online: 18 Jun 2008 *

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