SEASONAL SUPPLY CHAIN AND THE BULLWHIP EFFECT

In this study, we quantify the bullwhip effect in a seasonal two echelon supply chain with stochastic lead time. The bullwhip effect is the phenomenon of demand variability amplification when one moves away from the customer to the supplier in a supply chain. The amplification effect poses very severe problems for a supply chain. The retailer faces external demand for a single product from end customers where the underlying demand process is a seasonal autoregressive moving average, SARMA (1,0)X(0,1)(s) demand process. And the retailer employs a base stock periodic review policy to replenish its inventory from the upstream party every period using the minimum mean-square error forecasting technique. We investigate what parameters influence the bullwhip effect and how large each parameter affects it. In addition, we investigate the respective relationship between the seasonal period and the lead time, the seasonal moving average coefficient, and the autoregressive coefficient on the bullwhip effect in a seasonal supply chain.