Current and Future Researches on Supply Chain Management

Abstract

A supply chain management(SCM) is becoming recognized as a core competitive strategy in the business world. Despite its current widespread popularity, SCM remains a somewhat mysterious concept. Its basic concepts are not clearly understood. Especially it is a kind of new trend and new idea of research areas in Korea. The definitions and histories of SCM and some researches are discussed and introduced in this paper, According to the modeling approach, we divide researches into three categories: deterministic models, stochastic models, simulation models. The structure of a typical supply chain in manufacturing system is also presented here. To implement SCM in real logistic world, researchers have mostly modeled it in the analytical ways using deterministic or stochastic method. However, most of realistic problems are not simple to apply these analytical ways. Simulation is most preferred when an analytic solution to a model that gives exact values for performance evaluations is not feasible. In particular, the simulation optimization method which reflect the dynamics and multi input variables of SCM well enough is discussed as one of simulation method in this paper.