Mitigating the Bullwhip Effect in Supply Chain: A Cloud computing approach

The Bullwhip effect (BWE) in a supply chain creates unexpected distortion due to variation of demand and often cripples demand forecasting accuracy. In absence of accurate demand forecasting, stakeholders in a supply chain (ex: retailer, wholesaler, manufacturer and supplier) face inventory disruptions like overstocking, under stocking & stock out situation resulting in higher cost, lower quality and lower customer satisfaction. Adoption of generic solutions like Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) or Standardization of Order Lot-sizing often becomes unfeasible for smaller suppliers due to associated high cost of capital. Objective of this paper is to present a systematic approach of information sharing and collaboration among supply chain partners using cloud computing platforms. As cloud computing services are „on-demand‟, billed on „pay-as-you-use‟ model and offers seamless mobility, all supply chain partners can use it to collaborate with each other with least possible cost to mitigate the impact of Bullwhip effect along entire supply chain.