Flexible configuration for seamless supply chains: Directions towards decision knowledge sharing

Supply chain excellence has a real huge impact on business strategy. Building supply chains (SC"s) as flexible system represents one of the most exciting opportunities to create value (e.g., seamless SC"s). This requires integrated decision making amongst autonomous chain partners with effective decision knowledge sharing among them. The key to success lies in knowing which decision has more impact on the supply chains performance. Knowledge sharing has immense potential to create expedient opportunities and thus retain greater value for supply chains. In this context, knowledge management (KM) can be used as an effective approach to achieve knowledge sharing and decision synchronization among supply chain partners. To maximize competitive advantage, concept of seamless supply chains is emerging with KM as key enabler. Thus, there is a need to develop demo models that can encourage chain members towards collaborative-knowledge sharing in the SC"s. This paper depicts the application of one such model based on decision knowledge sharing (DKS) for improved supply chains management. We study the impact of DKS (both partial and full DKS configuration in SC) and then compare the performance with information sharing (IS) and forecasting. By exploiting DKS and flexibility in supply chains structures better performance can be achieved. The paper develops the demo models on various supply chains scenario like (1st, 2nd and 3rd stage SC"s, forecasting, IS and DKS (full and partial). The partial and full DKS based flexibility configurations of SC"s are considered for simulation experimentation. A simulation model of a supply chains based on flexible framework is developed for demo purposes. The key results are highlighted along with the respective industry implications. Our research is continuing in this direction.