A Decision Support Framework to Assess Grocery Retail Supply Chain Collaboration: A System Dynamics Modelling Approach

Supply chain collaboration contributes to improving overall performance through increasing sales, refining forecasts, reducing inventory costs, and improving customer service. In order to be efficient and cost effective, total costs have to be minimized across the entire supply chain. Collaboration efforts run into many practical challenges, both internal and external among small retailers. This paper proposes a framework of retailer supply chain collaboration to identify better understanding of collaboration benefit. A system dynamics simulation modelling approach is used to represent the collaboration effect on the dynamics of this complex system that helps retailer supply chains to obtain maximum benefit of collaborative relationships and reduce the bullwhip effect. This work helps researchers to use supply chain collaboration dynamic modelling to examine how information sharing across a supply chain can result in the identification and prioritization of better order decisions that can be aligned with the retail supply chain’s value proposition for further supply chain integration.