Research On Coordination In Supply Chain Management

Supply chain management(SCM) has been a hot research field of academia since the nineties of the twentieth century. One of the important parts of SCM is to coordinate various links of a supply chain(SC) because it is a typical system and needs to be coordinated. Coordination is viewed as important means of SC's firmness and operation and has attracted broad attention of academia. Deep analysis and systematic study on coordination in SCM are of great significance in theory and practice.Based on analyzing and summarizing a large volume of domestic and foreign literature on SCM, the paper focuses on researching theoretically coordination in SCM from four aspects: strategic alternatives of SC coordination, SC coordination based on partnership, SC coordination based on common replenishment period and performance measurement of SC coordination, and arrives at some useful conclusions. The main points and innovations of the paper are as follows:1. The research on SCM is divided into 10 research fields according to the similarity and importance of recent domestic and foreign literature on SCM and our comprehension to research on SCM. The paper illustrates each research result in each field and the prime existing problems of research on SCM are presented.2. The basic idea of SCM is analyzed, and the definitions of SCM and SCM are given respectively. The paper summaries the key elements of SCM and the existing pitfalls in SCM in China. Classifying SC coordination, the paper analyzes and concludes each research result.3. The problems that face SC coordination are analyzed, and on the basis of the case three strategic alternatives of SC coordination, which are "forming SC partnerships", "adopting vertical integration" and "establishing incentive mechanism", are presented, and each strategy is discussed particularly.4. SC partnerships are divided into three types according to supply and demand patterns between SC members. Then the mathematic models of SC coordination under each of partnerships are built, and specific analysis and numerical study are executed respectively in the cases of coordination and non-coordination, and the beneficial conclusion is drawn.5. How to accomplish SC coordination under elastic demand and stochastic demand by common replenishment period as a mediator of SC coordination is presented and analyzed. In course of analyses, the corresponding mathematic models are built, the numerical study is executed and the beneficial conclusion is drawn.6. The concept of performance measurement of SC coordination is given. A performance measurement index system of synthetic coordination of SC is established, and involved measures are quantified. Finally, the paper discusses methods of performance measurement of SC coordination and their applications.