| Application of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology in supply chain is currently one of the most discussed research topics in production and operations management (POMS). RFID improves the visibility of real time inventory and lead time information among supply chain partners. Although the various benefits due to this increased visibility have been broadly discussed by practitioners, how to integrate this technical advancement into business decision making process and how much benefit can be expected have not been specifically addressed in the literature.;This dissertation research explored the benefits of integrating RFID-enabled information into supply chain management from two perspectives. First, we developed a two-echelon supply chain model to represent the competition between retailers on upstream (distributor) supply capacity. The retailer adopting RFID replenishes its inventory judiciously by integrating the distributor's on-hand inventory and outstanding orders information obtained by RFID into its replenishment decision-making process, whereas the retailer without RFID does not. Our results show that the adoption of RFID benefits both the retailer with RFID and the distributor in reduced backorders and in lower total costs. Simultaneously, we also observed that in some cases the retailer without RFID had costs increase resulting from the failure of competition with the retailer with RFID on the limited supply capacity. Second, we developed a three-echelon supply chain model to study the effects of RFID-enabled advance information sharing (AIS) on supply chain coordination. Advance information includes advance demand information (ADI) and advance supply information (ASI) representing knowledge regarding future demand and supply, respectively. We found that a reduced batch size can help the manufacturer take greater advantage of ADI obtained by RFID. |
