The bullwhip effect: causes, intensity, and mitigation

Abstract

This research explores the causes and intensity of demand fluctuation and supply shortage of a supply chain (SC) occurred specially at the festival times. Management offers sales incentives & product discounts at festival times that sometimes create a complex situation to supply the demands properly. This complexity restricts SC performance and market possession. Hence, this research aimed to explore the responsible causes behind this complexity & bullwhip occurrence and claimed sales force incentives, number of echelons, price variation, quantity discount, & machine breakdown as the most responsible causes. Intensity of bullwhip effect (BWE) was measured by Fuzzy Inference System (FIS) of MATLAB TM to visualize their severity on SC performance. Few strategies have been proposed to minimize thier severity on SC excellence. Finally, this article proposed some managerial applications and guidelines to release the management from the frequently arising problems of distorted demands that will result in proper production & inventory management.

Impact of Bullwhip Effect in Quality and Waste in Perishable Supply Chain

“…[2] identified four causes that may be generating the bullwhip effect: demand update, price variation, order batch, a rational game of shortages. Research in the last 20 years has made it possible to identify additional causes of the bullwhip effect and classify them according to human behavior and the behavior of the company's operation [3,26].…”

“…Research on the causes of the bullwhip effect is a journey that began with [87] when first identifying this phenomenon. Today there are human and operational classifications for the causes of the bullwhip effect, to the point that it is possible to go more in detail and find sub-classifications that show new elements such as machinery maintenance plans and changes in the methods to process information such as causes of the bullwhip effect in the supply chain [26]. According to the review carried out, we can conclude:…”

“…[6,17] they establish the lack of synchronization between the actors in the chain and the failure to share information as operational causes of the bullwhip effect, and ref. [25] ensures that information sharing reduces the influence of bullwhip effect [26] added more categories to the operational causes and found that the pressures caused by the commercial part of the company to meet sales goals and the number of actors in the supply chain and damage to production machines are additional factors that increase the whip effect.…”

“…Ref. [26] makes contributions such as the breakdown of machinery and the number of intermediaries as other operational causes. [7] proposes a new cause such as the level of deterioration of the product, found in "other causes"-the structure of the bullwhip effect's causes shown in Figure 2.…”

Emerging challenges to greening of supply chains: an empirical study

“…They also realized the growing significance of the complexities of the supply chain functions of a globally competitive environment. Adequate literature is available which has discussed the traditional critical concerns related to global supply chains such as supply chain disruption (Craighead et al , 2007), inconsistent product quality (Foster, 2008), erratic delivery times (Levy, 1997), unexpected additional costs (Geary et al , 2006), and demand fluctuation and supply shortage during festival times (Rahman et al ., 2020), etc.…”