The advent of new information and communication technology has greatly facilitated the information exchange practices within supply chains. These practices recently evolved into new forms of collaborations between companies such as Information Sharing (IS) and Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI). The VMI is a coordination mechanism where the supplier is responsible for the inventory management of his customer. This mechanism is based on several principles, including developed information sharing between involved parties. The use of IS and VMI allow companies to increase profits and reduce costs. However, the results about the benefits from their use remain not clear. This motivates the need for new assessments and a better understanding of their effects. This thesis main contribution lies in the analysis and comprehension of IS and VMI’s impacts on supply chains. Especially, we address the issue of supply chains where tiers are production companies with different effectiveness levels. The examined scenario is based on a three tiers supply chain where each tier can belong to four effectiveness classes. The supply chain can respond to two types of end market demands: stable demands or fluctuant demands. In addition, several coordination mechanisms are studied: (i) standard management mechanism, (ii) information sharing between two enterprises, (iii) information sharing between three enterprises, (iv) VMI and (v) Extended VMI to all the three enterprises. The tool used to conduct these experiments is the discrete event simulation software “Arena”. The interpretation of the results showed that the IS coordination mechanism has not very significant improvement. Indeed, as companies have finite capacity, the availability of information did not yield better results. Whereas, the VMI could achieve reductions in both inventory and supply chain costs. In addition, VMI improved profits of the two parties, the vendor and the customer. Finally, the advantages of VMI appear to be stronger when the overall supply chain is less effective.
Information sharing and Vendor Managed Inventory impacts on supply chain performance.