The impacts of component commonality on integrated supply chain network performance: a state and resource-based simulation study

Abstract

This paper is geared toward developing an integrated modeling framework and simulation models for understanding decision-making issues of the supply chain network configuration in an integrated environment.

To achieve this objective, first, this paper presents an integrated modeling framework for multistage supply chains, in which the interdependencies between model components are captured. Second, the state and resource-based simulation concepts are used to model the supply chain network configurations. The employment of state and resource-based simulation techniques facilitates the implementation procedure, since they are strong in modeling dynamic supply chain networks with highly interdependent components subject to activity start-up conditions. To investigate the impacts of component commonality on integrated supply chain network performance effectively, a new analytical measure of component commonality that consists of a component-level commonality index and a product-level commonality index is defined. The results of analysis-of-variance and Tukey’s tests reveal that there is a significant difference in performance measures, such as delivery time and order fill rates, when comparing an integrated supply chain with higher component commonality to an integrated supply chain with lower component commonality.