Research On The Supply Chain With Capital Constraints Based On Sales Promotion And Customer Returns

The traditional research on supply chain management assumes that the supply chain is well funded,and enterprises in the supply chain can use their own capital to achieve their optimal decisions.However,with the rapid development of economy,the competition among enterprises becomes intensified.The financial pressure faced by enterprises is increasing day by day,and the shortage of funds has become a very common phenomenon.Under this situation,considering the impact of capital flow on supply chain management has gradually become a hot topic of concern to scholars,and the relevant research on the capital constrained supply chain comes into being.In the study of capital constrained supply chain,scholars have extended the traditional supply chain management research field,and put forward some supply chain decision models under the influence of financial constraints.By observing these models,it is found that the market demand is an important factor in the model,and will directly affect the final decisions of the supply chain.Along with the progress of the era,especially the popularity of the Internet in the new century,many enterprises choose to carry out promotional activities and allow customers to return the unwanted products to increase their market share.The enterprises affect the realization of market demand of their products through sales effort and customer returns,but,at the same time,enterprises will also bear the corresponding processing costs.Therefore,based on the previous studies,this paper separately introduces the sales effort and customer returns into a capital-constrained supply chain system,and discusses the influence of these two factors on supply chain decisions.According to the research content,this paper is divided into the following two parts:The first part is the research on the operation and optimization of a capital constrained supply chain under the sales effort,which is the third chapter of this paper.This part studies a supply chain system consisting of one supplier and one capital-constrained retailer.It firstly explores the retailer's joint operation and financing decisions when the capital-constrained retailer conducts promotional activities,and then discusses how the retailer's funds are distributed between inventory procurement and sales promotion.This part also discusses the retailer's optimal decisions in view of whether the retailer has any external financing opportunity,and further explores the influence of the wholesale price,the financing interest rate and the initial capital level on the retailer's decisions and its fund allocation strategy.The results show that the allocation strategy is significantly influenced by its initial capital level.When there are no external financing opportunities,the retailer will carry out the procurement and promotion activities simultaneously if the initial capital is high,but with the decrease of the initial capital,the retailer will only carry out the procurement activities.In addition,when the capital-constrained retailer has the opportunity to finance,the proportion of the allocation of funds between procurement and promotion will decrease in the initial capital level.The second part is the study of the operation and coordination of a capital-constrained supply chain under customer returns,which is mainly the fourth chapter of this paper.This part shares the same research object as that in Chapter 3,and it also studies the supply chain system composed of a single supplier and a single capital-constrained retailer,and further considers the impact of customer returns.Customer returns have been a significant problem for all parties in the supply chain,especially for a capital-constrained retailer that confronts the dual pressures of financing difficulties and customer returns.However,how to improve the operation of a capital-constrained supply chain under the circumstance of customer returns is still a problem.Based on the problem,this part designs a supplier subsidy contract,which integrates trade credit,return subsidy and customer returns policy into a modeling framework to explore the impact of customer returns on the decisions of both the supplier and the retailer.Consequently,it is found that the supplier return subsidy can benefit the whole supply chain,and even can coordinate the supply chain.Different from the traditional supply chain management research,this paper takes the impact of capital flow on the operation and management of supply chain into account,and further combines the capital-constrained supply chain with sales effort and customer returns.To sum up,on the one hand,this research enriches and consummates the traditional theory of supply chain management,which has important theoretical value;on the other hand,the two parts of the study are closely related with the reality,the conclusions of which are helpful to guide the practice.