The Design And Simulation Research On Supply Chain Performance Measurement System Under Environment Of E-Business

Nowadays the unprecedented development of E-business has largely changed business operation, which indeed affects the transactions and relationships among firms and customers. The E-business technology has endowed supply chain management (SCM) more abundant implications, especially by the diffusion of Internet technology through out SCM. Firms are strategically concerned about this brand new management model of Internet-based SCM. Moreover, performance evaluation is of much importance to the comprehensive strategic management of Internet-based supply chain, so as to measure the targets set on perspectives of finance, customer service and operation activities. An effective and scientific performance measurement system for Internet-based supply chain is both necessary and significant. Based on the theme of building the measurement system, this paper begins with a thorough review of researches on supply chain performance evaluation, and then discusses the Internet-based supply chain system by its'structure and features. After constructed the performance evaluation system using the approach of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC), this paper deplored further in detail of the simulation model for performance evaluation system using simulation technology of the Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCM), which is of some benefits for future research on BSC and simulation. First of all, this paper goes through the classic researches on very specific indicators, taxonomies and components for supply chain performance measurement system construction. From the point of E-business technology strategic applications on SCM, then this paper sets forth how the Internet could support activities efficiently like procurement, order fulfillment and customer services etc., and how the information sharing could promote supply chain integration and collaboration. This paper concludes that the performance of Internet-based supply chain comes from four different sources as information value, operation value, customer value and suppliers value. Second of all, this paper develops the framework for Internet-based supply chain performance measurement using BSC approach introduced by Kaplan and Norton in 1992, and select the sample indicators related with the E-business SCM strategy. Moreover, one of the most critical theoretic principal of BSC is the cause-and-effect relationships among all indicators in the measurement system, which, however, was largely ignored by the static mathematical calculations. From this very point generates the second important research work in the paper, that to explore the useful value of causal links for decision making in strategic management of Internet-based supply chain. This paper employs the FCM technology to establish the simulation model based on system dynamics. The virtue of FCM is that it could reflect the causal links in a complex system and record the dynamic process when nodes affect each other through those links until system reaches stabilization. The employment of FCM in this paper is divided into two related directions, one is to answer the "what-if"questions in decision making according to how the key performance indicators'disturbance affect the overall performance system; the other is to predict the future performance result from the present situation and through inference process. Here FCM combines different expert knowledge and might help managers to make right decision from the forecast and human skills.