Intense completion between the firms in the market has forced the companies to organize into groups consisting of suppliers, manufacturers, distributors and retailers. By forming into groups these firms benefit from synergies of collaboration. A supply chain is an integration of suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers formed to reduce the costs and share the returns and risks by sharing information related to their domains with the other channel partners. The ultimate objective of a supply chain is to pass the benefits of integration of supply chains to consumers, by offering products with competitive prices. As the prices of inputs are always increasing, the costs of production and distribution are also increasing. Unless there are models to reduce these costs, a manufacturing firm cannot remain competitive in the market. Also, with globalization companies are outsourcing their production activities to developing countries where the labour costs are low and they are importing the manufactured products from these countries and distributing them in the developed countries. The companies are looking into logistics as the last frontier to reduce the costs. In the past, several frame works and models have been developed in the literatures that address the problems and issues of logistics in a supply chain management context. In this work, a decentralized production-distribution planning model for a multi-product multi-period supply chain has been proposed. Also a centralized production-distribution planning model has been proposed for the same supply chain. Also, a case study has been taken up to implement the above two models in GAMS. The benefits and costs involved with centralized model has been shown.
Volume 11 | 04-Special Issue
Pages: 2167-2172