Studies On Risk Of Dual-channel Supply Chain With Demand Uncertainty

The rapid development and application of Internet has connected more and more industries with Internet. Internet technology begins to change the consumers’ shopping habits gradually, creating a new business model, namely dual-channel supply chain. The dual-channel supply chain means that a commodity can be sold online and offline at the same time, but the adoption of the online channel attracts part of the customer from the offline retailers and brings competition. In fact, both channels have advantages and disadvantages. The online channel provides convenience for the customer, but customer needs to wait for a long time to receive the goods because of a delivery lead time. The seller of online channel with a third party payment platform may need a period of time to receive payment finally after customers receive the goods, which is called collection lead time. It also brings cash flow uncertainty from the perspective of online channel. In addition, the customer cannot intuitively feel the goods and the goods prone to damage in transit, thus customer may return the goods after delivery. Store design and staff guidance of the offline channel allows customers to learn more detailed information about the product, however, it not only costs more shopping time, cost of transportation and energy of consumer, but also increases the retailer’s cost.Because of information asymmetry, neither manufacturers nor retailers can predict the demand of customers accurately, which brings a certain impact on the production, ordering, pricing and increases various costs. The greater the demand uncertainty, the greater the risk. To deal with the channel competition, offline channels provides value-added services, improve the level of service quality, while online channel chooses good logistics distribution severs to reduce the risk of transportation of goods and shorten the delivery time, resulting in faster recovery of money. The members of the supply chain employ various methods to improve customer channel loyalty and reduce the uncertainty of future demands.Base on the aforementioned analysis of the dual channel supply chain, this thesis does research on the risk caused by uncertainty of customer demand in dual channel supply chain. The main research contents, research methods and research innovation, are as follows:(a) This thesis analyses the cash flow risk of the dual-channel supply chain and introduces two strategies to reduce the demand uncertainty. This is the first thesis to model the risk in the dual-channel supply chain from the perspective of cash flow, which employs variance as the uncertainty of cash flow. In consideration of newsboy problem model, we analysis and predict production, orders, inventory and sales of retailer and manufacturer in online and offline channel in some time periods. We also analysis cash inflows and cash outflow, and then find out the influencing factors of cash flow risk.(b) Due to the inaccessibility to accurate market prediction, the risk caused by the uncertainty of customer demand has certain influence on the profit of dual-channel supply chain. Firstly, this thesis proposed an advance selling discount strategy to reduce the uncertainty of the demand in the perspective of pricing. In dual-channel supply chain, two channels can choose whether to adopt the advance selling discount strategy that allows customers to order the product before the regular selling season, give the customer a price discount at the same time. In this model, we assume product is seasonal or perishable and consumer can only obtain the product in the normal sales season. The total consumer demand is fixed and customers can transfer to each channel according to different channel price discount. Based on the newsboy problem model, we derive the optimal order quantity of the two channels, and then obtain the optimal discount value according to the assumption. As a matter of fact, there exist four strategy combinations due to the consideration of whether the two channels employ the advance selling discount policy. Without considering the strategy implementation cost, we derive the Nash equilibrium of the game, where both the two channels adopt the strategy. Finally, we consider the implementation cost, and calculate the equilibrium condition of the Nash equilibrium.(c) Online-to-offline (020) is a new supply chain model to increase cooperation between the members of dual-channel supply chain. We propose a method to reduce the demand uncertainty of dual-channel supply chain from the perspective of inventory in the 020 supply chain, which is called lateral inventory transshipment. Lateral inventory transshipment means that when one channel is out of stock, the other channel can meet the needs of customer orders if it has inventory surplus, but need to pay a transship price according to the prior agreement. This will not only reduce the risk of out of stock, but also reduce the salvage cost of the other channel. We considered centralized OTO supply chain; decentralized OTO supply chain without transshipment and decentralized O2O supply chain with transshipment, and then employ the newsboy problem model to obtain the order quantity and the optimal transfer price in different circumstances.