Simulating an internet product delivery supply chain with multi-item orders

The increase of e-commerce has developed new challenges for online retailing companies delivering product orders to customers. With this challenge, a new type of supply chains have been developed aiming to cope with a strict control of lead time and associated costs. In this paper a model of an internet product delivery supply chain with multi-item orders is simulated. We address specifically the mismatch between supply and demand when retailers for any reason are unable to estimate the configuration of multiitem orders or single item orders. Three scenarios of demand configuration are simulated (demand as expected, lower than expected and higher than expected) using discrete-event simulation to look at the effect on lead time. A detailed numerical analysis is used to draw conclusions.