Inventory Management & Control For Multi-layer Hybrid Supply Chain

In the global economy environment, the business competition has become throat-cutting. This has lengthened the supply chain of many companies. And the structure of supply chain has become hybrid with multiple layers. The increased complexity of supply chain structure has complicated the inventory management and control as well and made it extremely challenging. However, in practice there are lack of the effective methods and techniques for the inventory management and control for the multi-layer and hybrid supply chain. Therefore, it is imperative to study this issue to help the industry effectively manage the inventory.Based on the fundamental theories and models of the supply chain management, this paper analyzed the unique characteristics of multi-layer hybrid supply chain, and identified the current problems encountered in the multi-layer hybrid supply. Based on the problems, the paper identified the key contributing factors and tackled them systematically.Firstly, this paper discussed the strength and the weakness of current five structures of the supply chain including the dyadic, serial, divergent, converge and hybrid. Then based on the analysis of the current models, this paper proposed the structure and the methodology for multi-layer and hybrid supply chain. The key factors of inventory management and control have been identified as the warehouse locations, the number of warehouses, inventory control policy, order frequency of the central warehouse and as well as the distributor, the order quantity and so on.Because of the complexity and scale of the multi-layer hybrid supply chain, most of current pure mathematical models are incapable to tackle this problem. So this paper proposed to use simulation techniques to model the supply chain. The procedures and methods are detailed in this paper for simulation study.Finally, practical industrial case study has been conducted to verify the efficiency and effectiveness of the research result.