Supply chain is a network of suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers that act together to control, manage, and improve the overall supply chain performance. The most important and critical part of decision making is identifying the different sides of supply chain's performance. Evaluating the performance of the whole supply chain is a complex task, due to the complexity inherent in the structure and operations of the supply chain. This study presents a suggestion for a comprehensive system to evaluate the performance of the supply chain in eight dimensions (i.e., financial, customer, internal operations, learning and growth, people, environmental, and political perspectives). The proposed performance evaluation system (PES) suggests a procedural framework to explain the application methodology of that PES. Moreover, the study offers a simulation modelling methodology for modelling the complex system of supply chain. It also provides a real world case study to clarify the applicability of the proposed PES.

Supply chains, always, face increased uncertainty in demand. For that reason, inventory control presents a critical issue of supply chain management. Controlling inventories with proper policies can enhance customer service levels, smooth production plans, and reduce operation costs. In this paper, a framework is suggested for evaluating and comparing different types of inventory control policies. Four distinct inventory control policies are discussed and modeled. Different types of measures are used to evaluate the performance of the supply chains which implement these inventory control policies; performance measures used are; fill rate, as an example of desired measures (to be increased), and inventory level, as an example of undesired measures (to be decreased). A framework for evaluating and comparing the overall performance of the inventory policy is developed and applied. A discrete event simulation with ARENA simulation package is used for developing a simplified supply chain model consists of two echelons, with one supplier that prepares and supplies raw materials to a production/inventory system, which has two different inventories, one for supplied raw materials, and the other for finished products. A numerical example is provided to illustrate the applicability of the developed framework. The applied numerical example clarified the ability of the evaluation framework to deal with different types of inventory control policies, and different practice scenarios.

In today's global market, it becomes essential for supply chains to adapt powerful management policies. These policies might be verified and validated before its implementation in the real world. Simulation is a powerful effective tool for this purpose, so that, the last decade offered different supply chain simulation types. This paper is concerned with a review of supply chain management (SCM) simulation types in the recent researches. In particular, four SCM simulation types are reviewed, spreadsheet, system dynamics (SD), discrete-event dynamic systems (DEDS), and business games simulation types. The reviewed researches present great interest of SCM researchers in DEDS simulation among the four reviewed simulation types.