Efficiency of the Long Chain: A Random Walk Approach
Facing intense market competition and high demand variability, firms are beginning to use exible process structure to improve its ability to match supply with uncertain demand. The concept of chaining have been extremely in uential in this area, with many large automakers already making this the cornerstone of their business strategies to remain competitive in the industry.There have been numerous studies in the literature trying to justify the effectiveness of the chaining strategy, but to the best of our knowledge, there have been little concrete analytical results on the performance of the chaining strategy, vis-a-viz the full exibility system. In this paper, we study the symmetric system where the (mean) supply and demand are balanced and identical. We utilize the concept of a generalized random walk to evaluate the asymptotic performance of the chaining structure in this environment. We show that the performance of the 2-chain is related to properties (overshoots and stopping times) of the random walk model , and we can evaluate the exact asymptotical performance of 2-chain for a variety of realistic demand distributions.
Mabel C. Chou Geoffrey A. Chua Chung-Piaw Teo
Department of Decision Sciences, NUS Business School
国际会议
2007 International Conference on Manufacturing & Service Operations Management(2007制造与服务运作管理国际学术会议)
北京
英文
2007-06-18（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）