| Description |
Supply chain management involves coordination and collaboration among organizations at different echelons of a supply chain. This dissertation explores two challenges to supply chain coordination: trade promotion (sales incentive offered by a manufacturer to its downstream customers, e.g., distributors or retailers) and bullwhip effect (a phenomenon of amplification of demand variability from downstream echelons to upstream echelons in the supply chain). Trade promotion represents one of the most important elements of the marketing mix and accounts for about 20% of manufacturers’ revenue. However, the management of trade promotion remains in a relatively under-researched state, especially for nongrocery products. This dissertation describes and models the effectiveness of trade promotion for healthcare products in a multiechelon pharmaceutical supply chain. Trade promotion is identified in the literature as a cause of the bullwhip effect, which has long been of interest to both researchers in academia and industrial practitioners. This dissertation develops a framework to decompose the conventional inter-echelon bullwhip measure into three intra-echelon bullwhips, namely, the shipment, manufacturing, and order bullwhips, and explores the empirical relationship between the bullwhip and the time duration over which it is measured. This dissertation also analyzes the potential bias in aggregated bullwhip measurement and examines various driving factors of the bullwhip effect. Theoretical and managerial implications of the findings are discussed. |
