A PRACTICAL APPROACH TO PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT AND OPTIMISATION IN SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT

This paper presents a simulation study of a serial supply chain employing the Kanban production control strategy and examines the trade-off between the conflicting objectives of maximising customer service level and minimising average Work-In-Process (WIP). A simulation model was developed in Extend Sim V6 for a four-node centralised serial Supply Chain (SC) adopting Kanban to process a single product. The model was used to explore the impact of essential input factors e.g. the number of Kanban cards at each node, the maximum production capacity of a node, and the standard deviation of demand on customer service level and the average WIP using Response Surface Methodology (RSM). Design-Expert V7 was used to construct the experimental design matrices, analyse the experimental data, and conduct a metamodel-based multi-objective SC optimisation. This paper provides a discussion of the experimental results and implications for supply chain managers and offers insights on future research opportunities in this field.