Research On Inventory Strategy Of Dual-channel Supply Chain Based On Risk Uncertainty

With the development of science and technology, the social economic transformation paving a broad road for enterprise informatization. Many of the traditional supply chain stakeholders begun to make inroad into dual-channel supply chain. They set up online sale channel to improve the diversity of sales channels, provide consumers more choices and also keeping pace with the development of economic technology. In the circle of supply chain, inventory coordination plays a very significant role. It's a problem that how to ensure the supply chain inventory at the optimal level to providing retailers and consumer goods in the most effective way is the biggest conflict of supply chain inventory. As we know, the inventory setting is determined by comprehensive indexes. One of the indexes is consumer demand. Normally, the demand of consumer is unstable and can't be predicted accurately due to the impact cased by complicated factors under the big context of market. Thus, how to make the optimal inventory decisions accurately under different risk level of consumer demand, becomes the problem we going to explore in this paper.The paper adopted the basic theory of newsboy and applied two inventory strategies, one named Stackelberg distributed inventory mode and the other called retailer dominated centralizing inventory mode. These two modes respectively described the conditions that dominated by the manufacturers and the retailers in the dual-channel supply chain. Assuming that demand is follow the normal distribution. The market demand risk change with the consumer demand at the same time. It drew a conclusion on the volume of optimal inventory in different risk level of consumer demand and also figured out the maximize profits for both manufacturers and retailers in the dual-channel supply chain. Findings of the paper: Firstly, under the Stackelberg distributed inventory mode, manufacturers took control of the online sales channel profit and get considerable advantages in the mode. While manufacturers should reduce the stock holdings to lower the inventory cost. Secondly, in the retailer dominated centralizing inventory mode, retailers earn the profits of online sale channel and less affected by the uncertainty of consumer demand in the market, so retailers could acquire a great advantage in this mode, for instance, reducing the cost on consumer demand research. Finally, as there is an increase on market demand and the risk level of predicting market demand, it is Stackelberg distributed inventory mode that more adapted to the high-risk degree of market demand and high market demand.