Inter-Organizational Collaboration For Optimizing Textile Supply Chains

With the increasing demand for personalization and customization in today's fashion market,flexible small-series production and mass customization have become the mainstream direction for the development of textile supply chain.In order to meet this trend,the structure of textile supply chain needs to be reorganized and new supply chain model needs to be developed.Inter-organizational supply chain collaboration played a vital role in supply chain practice and research;it has become a promising direction to solve the aforementioned problems.In order to maintain their competitiveness in future textile industry,textile companies,especially SMEs,need to develop cooperative relationships with other companies and implement appropriate supply chain collaboration strategies.This thesis utilized supply chain collaboration as the main research ontology and proposed three inter-organizational collaboration models for the textile supply chain with different objectives in different contexts.The first model is an inter-organizational collaboration model targeting the garment manufacturing stage of textile supply chain.In this study,a novel resource sharing mechanism was proposed and was applied as the main mode of collaboration.The resource sharing mechanism was implemented between two garment manufacturers.This study developed a simulation-based heuristic for obtaining the optimal solution for resource sharing.For different research problems,the study conducted a set of discrete event simulation experiment.The optimal resource sharing scenario under multiple conditions were attainedThe second model is to design and develop a central order processing system for the purpose of optimizing the entire textile supply chain under a demand-driven strategy.It is an innovative supply chain collaboration model integrating vertical collaboration and horizontal collaboration.The study used discrete event simulation techniques to experiment the new collaborative models under different conditions.Based on the results of simulation experiments,the study drew conclusions from the following four aspects:(1)comparison between new collaborative model for demand-driven textile supply chains and traditional demand-driven textile supply chain model,(2)evaluation of new collaborative model in different seasons(under different workload levels),(3)evaluation of new collaborative model in different supply chain stages,and(4)evaluation of individual profit level of each involved textile company.The third model is an innovative collaborative cloud service platform to optimize the make-to-order textile supply chain.The study developed a heuristic of optimal service provider selection for the various demands received by the cloud platform.In this study,multi-agent simulation technology was used to implement the innovative model and the corresponding cloud service platform.An experiment was conducted based on the multiagent model as well.The new model with cloud service platform was compared to two existing make-to-order textile supply chain models,namely the traditional model and the outsourcing model.Based on the simulation experiment,the superiority of the new model was demonstrated,which the collaborative cloud service platform can bring significant benefits to textile SMEs.This thesis developed three supply chain collaboration models for the textile supply chain,providing optimized solutions for mass customization,flexible production,and smallseries production.The feasibility and effectiveness of the three proposed models were verified through simulation experiments under different conditions.Textile companies,especially small and medium-sized companies,should strengthen their cooperation with other companies and change their business structure in accordance with the mechanisms and models proposed in this thesis,so that to enhance their competitiveness in the future of Industry 4.0.