A Study On Collaboration Of Cluster Supply Chain And Its Performance Evaluation Based On The Third-party Logistics

The cluster supply chain is the coupling of industrial cluster and supply chain in which there are many parallel single supply chains. The cluster enterprises not only work together with each other in the same supply chain but also compete or cooperate with the enterprises in other supply chain. The complicated competition and cooperation relationships reinforce the flexibility of industrial cluster. Considering this context, this dissertation brings the Third-party Logistics (TPL) in the cluster supply chain to study deeply the collaboration across chain and the performance evaluation of it. The research work and conclusions are summarized as follows.Firstly, the collaboration mechanism between TPL and cluster supply chain is analyzed and the collaboration framework and operation models are proposed. On the one side, the network structure of cluster supply chain is formed based on the industrial cluster theory and supply chain theory. The specialty of it is anatomized in four aspects including stratification of network, solid and multi-core, dualism of competition-cooperation and embeddedness based on trust. On the other side, according to the symbiotic relation in species group theory of bionomics, the collaboration models of TPL and industrial cluster are classified as three categories:equality symbiotic model, support symbiotic model and one-way accrual symbiotic model. Combining the two sides, the collaboration framework is constructed and the four operation models are designed.Secondly, the system dynamics model of single-item inventory collaboration control in cluster supply chain with TPL is established and the system performances under the stochastic demand environment is simulated. The single product inventory control model of cluster supply chain is constructed based on System Dynamics (SD). Then considering the across-chain replenishment of retailers between different supply chains, the VMI-APIOBPCS I model is extended to VMI-APIOBPCS II. Further, the third party logistics provider is introduced into the cluster supply chain network, the VMI&TPL-APIOBPCS model is proposed. The soft of Vensim is used to simulate the three models under stochastic demand. The simulation results are comparatively analyzed in inventory level, production rate, Bullwhip Effect and service level. The study shows that the model with TPL can remarkably decrease the cluster supply chain system inventory, effectively smooth the production rate, greatly reduce the Bullwhip Effect and clearly improve the customer service level.Thirdly, the system dynamics model of multi-item inventory collaboration control in cluster supply chain with TPL is constructed and simulated. The inventory item context is extended from single to multiple. Two system dynamics models of multi-item inventory collaboration control in cluster supply chain are formed based on two different scenes that TPL is included or not. Vensim is applied to simulate the operation of two models. The simulation results are compared and reveal that the participation of TPL can help to gain better match between the supply and demand, effectively reduce the inventory of manufacturers and smooth the variation of it, obviously improve customer service level of retailers but increase the system inventory a little.Last but not the least, the collaboration performance evaluation model of cluster supply chain based on BSC-SD is brought forward and simulated. According to the Balanced Scorecard (BSC), the key collaboration performance evaluation indexes are designed in four views including finance view, customer view, internal process and innovation study view. Then the system dynamics model of collaboration performance evaluation of cluster supply chain (CPV-CSC) is structured. The scenes in different collaboration environments and capacity policies are simulated and the collaboration performances of cluster supply chain are analyzed. The results show that higher degree of collaboration can greatly enhance capacity utility and fill rate, clearly increase customer satisfaction, product quality and innovation rate.