Effect of customer demand information sharing on a four-stage serial supply chain performance: an experimental study

Customer Demand Information (CDI) sharing plays a vital role in reducing the bullwhip effect as well as in improving the performance of a supply chain.The objective of the present research is to identify the best form of CDI sharing experimentally for a four-stage serial supply chain under lost sales business environment.A supply chain role play game software package is developed for conducting suitable experiments.Different forms of CDI sharing tested in this research are periodic CDI, history of CDI and CDI in the form of distribution.It is found that all forms of CDI sharing have significant impact on the reduction of bullwhip effect compared to non-sharing of information and the upstream stages in the supply chain are benefited the most under CDI sharing.The statistical analysis also confirms that sharing CDI in the form of distribution is the most effective among the various forms of information sharing studied.The percentage reductions in magnitude of order variance under the most benefitted information sharing at distributor and factory stages are 64.43 and 66.04, respectively.It is also found that the performance of a supply chain depends on the degree of customer demand information shared among the stages in the supply chain.