Analysing the performance of supply chain designs

In this study, three different distribution planning Supply Chain (SC) models for multilevel supply chain designs are considered. Demand is generated at the customer end and products which are manufactured in factories are delivered to customers through distribution centres and retailers. The first objective of this study is to get the SC model, which has a better performance among the three models with respect to seven performance metrics. Desirability functions are used to evaluate the different types of quality characteristics and then integrated into a single index to measure the total performance of a system with multiple responses. The second objective is to identify the most significant performance metrics on the SC models. Design of Experiment (DOE) and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) are respectively used for experiments planning and simulation results analysis. The demand pattern, inventory, manufacturing time and transportation cost are identified as the factors. All the factors are taken in three levels, except the demand pattern, which has only two levels.