Supply chain management tradeoffs analysis

Supply chain management involves understanding complex interactions between many factors and using the understanding to achieve balance between conflicting objectives. Simulation is a very useful technique to evaluate the impact of changes in factors such as inventory control and business process parameters. This paper describes a simulation based study for analyzing the tradeoffs among service level, inventory and lead times for a large logistics supply chain. The study highlights the use of simulation in understanding seemingly non-intuitive results and guiding the effort for performance improvement.