Supply Chain Management, Collaborative Production And Offline Settlement Mode

In recent years, automobile manufacturers have to face the high pressure of decreasing cost, enhancing quality, shortening delivery time and improving the services because of the drastic competition and fast changing requirements of market. Besides, those manufacturers should have the ability to provide an evaluation scientifically and the fast response to the continuous changing competition environment and customer requirements. Meanwhile, most manufacturers lie on the parts outsourcing to a fairly extent. In this case, the key factor for these companies to enhance the marketing competence is how to manage the relationship with their suppliers to reduce the cost. However, there are a lot of issues in the cooperation between manufacturers and suppliers both in the domestic and overseas practical supply chain management. How to decrease the cost for inventory management effectively, how to control the whole supply chain cost effectively and improve the performance of every single point of supply chain is the key challenge of each auto manufacturer.Vendor management inventory (VMI), JIT (Just in Time) and collaborative supply chain are hot topics among research institutes, manufacturing industries as well as special subjects of edge research in manufacturing and logistics nowadays.Generally, in a typical manufacturing supply chain environment modeled as "Supplier-Manufacturer" two-echelon system, the Buyers' Market makes the later to be on a dominative position to implement such inventory strategy and production mechanism as VMI and JIT strongly and win more profits without consideration of suppliers' hard-fact. As a consequence, it shows no synergetic effect.Considering that supplier relationship management becomes more and more important, and based on Auto industry supply chain practices, this dissertation try to address how, from the standpoint of the suppliers (weak roles in the chain), to cooperate with manufacturers to improve performance of the supply chain and at the same time to maximize benefit for themselves and achieve finally long term strategic partnership.Firstly, this thesis presents the background, motivation of the study and states its content and structure. Then an introduction and synthesis of related supply chain collaboration mechanism are provided, followed by a focused review of literature in multi-stage supply chain modeling. Afterwards, the framework of a Collaborative Production Reference Model with the inventory level and cost as two main performance measures is proposed. The model incorporates planning, production and supply among related cooperative players in the chain. Under deterministic condition, sub-models developed in the model include demand forecast, inventory level decision, parts requirement, jointly optimized production and delivery. Particularly, Pay-on-Produce sub-model, as an extension of VMI and JIT philosophy, is also elaborated in detail. As an enhancement of the model, some stochastic factors such as the demand uncertainty and production capacity uncertainty are also taken into consideration, and Guaranteed-service safety stock sub-model, vendors-selection sub-model and dynamic-programming production sub-model are accordingly developed.Finally, a case study with numerical illustrations and practical data from an Auto manufacture, as an evaluation of the reference model application, is demonstrated as the conclusion.