Impact of information sharing and vendor managed inventory on supply chain performance.

Summary The development of information and communication technologies in our century has greatly facilitated information exchange practices within supply chains. These practices have evolved into new forms of collaboration between companies, such as Information Sharing (IS) and Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI). VMI is a coordination mechanism in which the supplier is responsible for managing the inventory of its customer. This mechanism is based on several principles, among which is a highly developed sharing of information between the parties involved. IP and VMI are adopted by companies to increase profits and reduce costs. However, their results are mixed and require further understanding. The contribution of this thesis lies in the analysis of the impacts of these mechanisms on supply chains where all the links are production companies whose efficiencies may be different. To this end, several scenarios have been studied on logistics chains made up of three echelons, each echelon can belong to four efficiency classes. These chains can respond to two types of end-market demand: stable or variable demand. In addition, several coordination mechanisms are studied: standard management mechanisms, information sharing between two echelons, information sharing between three echelons, VMI between two echelons, and VMI extended to all three echelons. The tool used to conduct these experiments was the discrete event simulation software Arena. The interpretation of the results showed that the coordination mechanism with information sharing did not have a very significant improvement on the results. Indeed, since the companies have finite production capacities, the availability of information did not lead to different results. VMI, on the other hand, was able to achieve reductions in inventory and supply chain costs. These reductions were greater in supply chains with low efficiency links. In the latter case, both parties involved in the VMI (supplier and principal) benefited from the VMI. In the case of supply chains with high efficiency links, VMI has led to a smaller reduction in costs, as these supply chains are already high performance. In these cases, it is the customer who has benefited from VMI, while the VMI supplier has experienced an increase in costs due to the increased frequency of transport that this mechanism has involved.