Research On Three-level Supply Chain Coordination Mechanism Of Fresh Product With RFID Technology

Fresh products have characteristics such as perishable, a short life cycle, etc. The demand for them is greatly influenced by their freshness and price. The inaccurate stock issues on the side of retailers, together with the product efficiency problems during transportation on the side of distributors lead to products’ freshness change, which indirectly cause a significant impact on the supply chain revenue. The advantages of technologies such as RFID have been applied to improve enterprises’automation levels and accelerate the commodity circulation speed, which provides a potential possibility for fresh products to have a shorter transport time; Meanwhile RFID with the features of non-contact information transmission is regarded as an effective way to solve the problem of inventory inaccuracies.In this paper, a three-level supply chain with one producer, one distributor, and one retailer was studied for fresh products. And with the method of system modeling as well as theories such as supply chain management, game theories, the three-level supply chain was explored systematically before and after it uses RFID.Firstly, in this chapter, demand distribution was not given, two kinds of fresh products’ wastages were considered:one happens during the transportation process and the other happens when retailers sell products. It proved that revenue sharing contract could achieve coordination and members in the supply chain could reach a win-win situation before and after the three-level supply chain use RFID. Then, given the price was exogenous, the change of members’profit was discussed before and after using RFID in terms of the order quantity, which provided a general guidance for enterprises to make decisions on the order quantity when taking RFID.Secondly, considering that optimal profit expression could not be obtained when the demand distribution was not given, and enterprises were pursuing to maximize their benefits, the research work was further discussed and the specific demand distributions were given. Given the specific demand distributions, stocking factor was introduced for the purpose of simplification. The optimal profit expressions of the supply chain and its members before and after using RFID were got by formula deduction, and based on the optimal profit the decisions whether to adopt RFID or not were discussed for enterprises, and besides the scopes of variables for each decision were given.Finally, specific examples were taken to verify the conclusions’accuracy, and it proved that given the constraint that the conditions of a decision should be satisfied, RFID can effectively improve the profits of the supply chain and its members by controlling the transport time and improving the inventory recovery rate for fresh products.