A decision support system for strategic supply chain capacity planning under uncertainty: conceptual framework and experiment

Abstract

Supply chains now cope with a lot of uncertainties, and their stakeholders are intensely interconnected, revealing new opportunities at a tremendous pace. In this context, companies must rethink their decision support systems to remain competitive. Particularly strategic supply chain capacity planning systems that should ensure resource availability. Unfortunately, existing systems do not satisfactorily consider this new deal. Therefore, this paper develops a conceptual framework providing guidelines for designing a decision support system for strategic supply chain capacity planning under uncertainty. To validate the conceptual framework, a decision support system has been designed accordingly, and two industrial experiments have been conducted.

Making Strategic Supply Chain Capacity Planning more Dynamic to cope with Hyperconnected and Uncertain Environments

“…Results from Oger el al. [24] as well as the literature review of this paper lead to the conclusion that existing DSS are not satisfying enough to reach this objective. Mainly because existing DSS are too time consuming when it comes to assessing a multitude of what-if scenarios resulting from the combination of the multitude of decision options and uncertainty sources.…”

“…According to the existing SSCCP DSS conceptual framework this paper expands [24], the following two activities of the proposed SSCCP decision-making process should be fully automated: "generate an assessment model compatible with all what-if scenarios" and "assess what-if scenarios".…”

“…This creates a gap between the literature and the SSCCP DSS conceptual framework requirements. This gap led to the following research question: how to design a SSCCP DSS complying with the conceptual framework guidelines introduced by Oger et al [24], and especially the automation requirements?…”

“…To answer the research question, an SSCCP DSS was designed by proposing solutions that comply with the guidelines provided by the SSCCP DSS conceptual framework introduced by Oger et al [24]. The SSCCP DSS is composed of a SSCCP information system as well as a SSCCP decision-making process.…”

“…In other words, it is to design a DSS that will make SSCCP more dynamic to cope with hyperconnected and uncertain environments. A conceptual framework of this SSCCP DSS has already been introduced by Oger et al [24]. It provides guidelines for designing an uncertainty-and opportunity-driven SSCCP DSS.…”