An Interaction Investigation of the Contributing Factors of the Bullwhip Effect Using a Bi-Level Social Network Analysis Approach

Abstract

The bullwhip effect refers to the phenomenon of the increase in demand variability from supply chain downstream members to upstream members. This effect is critically important for the different sectors involved in a supply chain and is one of the main causes of inefficiency, material waste, and low sustainability in supply chain management. In order to help minimize the bullwhip effect and achieve sustainable development in a supply chain, this study identifies the influential factors of the bullwhip effect in a supply chain and the interactive relationships among them. A bi-level bullwhip effect analysis model was established to evaluate the causes of the bullwhip effect at different levels by using a social network analysis approach. Furthermore, to help achieve efficient and sustainable development, the implications of mitigating the impacts of the bullwhip effect in a supply chain were explored based on the results of the interrelationships analysis among the contributing factors of the bullwhip effect.

Social Network Analysis: Applications and New Metrics for Supply Chain Management—A Literature Review

“…Concepts derived from diverse fields of knowledge, such as SNA, have gained traction in terms of application in the area of SCM [10,17,[19][20][21][22][23]. Furthermore, new developments have emerged from the application of SNA in SCM, including directed and non-directed networks [24] and the concept of semi-directedness [25].…”

“…Besides, the metrics summarized in Table 2, others were provided in the articles reviewed. Zhou, Yip, Ren, and To [24] wished to identify the influential factors of the bullwhip effect in a supply chain and the interactive relationships among them, namely by calculating tie prediction metrics regarding a fashion industry and retail network. Adami, Verschoore, and Sellitto [29] conducted a case study in the turbine industry and provided a set of metrics to characterize the structural configuration and complexity of supply chains, namely structural holes [6,13].…”

“…Ref. [24] applied SNA to a case study of Zara to assess how minimizing the bullwhip effect contributes to sustainable development.…”

“…[1] noted the need to develop new metrics or indicators within the context of SNA. However, the vast majority of studies reported in the literature focus essentially on the centrality metrics already mentioned: degree centrality, closeness centrality, and betweenness centrality [12,17,21,24,32,45]. However, Ref.…”

A critical analysis on the triple bottom line of sustainable manufacturing: key findings and implications

“…Sustainability is one of the crucial issues as the continuously growing demand worldwide (Stock and Seliger 2016 ) and has attracted the attention of multiple industries and research fields like supply chain management (Koberg and Longoni 2019 ; Zhou et al 2020 ) and civil engineering (Zavadskas et al 2018 ). Due to the demands for a good quality of life and population growth and meeting with customer demands, manufacturing industries consume a significant amount of resources and result in the generation of pollution (Cassettari et al 2017 ).…”