THE COMBINED IMPACT OF PLACE POSTPONEMENTAND INFORMATION SHARING STRATEGIES ONREDUCING INFORMATION DISTORTION

Postponement strategy is one of the effective strategies to increase the supply chain’s responsiveness to product variations while information sharing strategy is a type of inter-organization’s coordination that the participants share useful information among them to improve the chain-wide performance. One recent finding on postponement is that it can improve the demand information quality: the quality of demand forecast is improved as the forecasting point moves closer to the production period and more information is gathered during the delayed period. Meanwhile, sharing demand information in supply chain has been shown to improve the accuracy of estimating demand parameters. Since these two types of strategies affect demand parameters in different ways, it is valuable to analyze the combined impact of these two strategies, called information shared postponement strategy, on improving the supply chain performance. This paper studies the combined impact of place postponement and various information sharing strategies on reducing information distortion and provides an illustration of how these two strategies affect the demand parameters simultaneously. The result shows that place postponement, combined with demand information sharing strategy, may perform better on reducing information distortion than that of place postponement alone, whether it is better than informationsharing alone conditionally depends on lead-times before/after postponing among the participants in the chain.