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ARC ProjectManaging Shared Resources in Supply Chains (ARC)
Supply Chain Management (SCM) is widely recognised as the largest source of potential gains in efficiency for the operations of organisations. It has also been the subject of many articles in the scientific literature, in the fields of Operations Management, Operations Research and Economy. The main lesson from SCM is that it is no longer enough for organisations to think about their own operations, they should take into account all other organisations that participate in the same value creation chain. The emphasis until now has been on sharing information and co-ordinating flows of goods between organisations. This has led to new ways of organising operations and new contracts between organisations since companies have recognised that there is a direct link between the performance of supply chains and the availability and quality of timely information. The scientific literature counts numerous works pointing out that sharing enables manufacturers to do a better job of managing their production and providing distributors with greater “in store” availabilities. Moreover, sharing information with suppliers and customers can reduce working capital and inventories. The flow of information through the supply chain enables companies to match supply closely to consumer demand and to anticipate changes in the marketplace. The logical next step is to coordinate not only flows of goods and information, but also shared resources. Information technologies enable much tighter coordination mechanisms between independent organisations. On the other hand the increasing complexity of most services and goods requires the utilisation of ever more sophisticated (and expensive) resources. Those resources benefit in general from large economies of scale that can better be captured if the resources can be shared among organisations. The goal is then to achieve the best possible performance with a decentralised control of these resources. Shared resources in a supply chain include common capacity used by different organisations. In this case the shared resource is owned by a specific actor and used for different purposes in the supply chain. Shared resources also concern mobile resources that circulate between actors and are necessary for product supply. Mobile resources embrace fleets of transportation equipment, equipment drivers / operators, trailers and containers in plant or distribution centre, pallets, rolls, gas cylinders etc. Thus shared resources are of very different natures. They range from the most mundane such as pallets or boxes to transport goods between different participants in the supply chain, to shared factories that entail large investments. The efficient and effective supply in case of shared resources depends on the ability of a supplier to co-ordinate his production capacity. The coordination of the use of the shared resources should help in answering the following questions:
Researchers
Tanja MLINAR History The project started in October 2008, is funded jointly by Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL) and Facultés Universitaires Catholiques de Mons (FUCAM) in the framework of the Actions de Recherche Concertées. We organize meetings every two or three months to share among all researchers our latest findings for the project.
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