Exploring the bullwhip effect through supply chain simulation software

The bullwhip effect is considered as an important characteristic of supply chain operation stability. Most studies on the bullwhip effect simplify supply chain structure. This paper develops the supply chain simulation software based browser/server model, which can build more complex supply chain. Applying the software, four experiments are designed and implemented. The experiments compare the different results conducting two information sharing policies under the different supply chain structures. The studies demonstrate that, under complex structure, the manufacture´s impact of information sharing on reducing bullwhip effect is less than distributor´s, which is a different result from the studies under simple supply chain structure.