Information Sharing in Supply Chains

Sharing information can improve interactions among enterprises in supply chains. It can facilitate coordination among the enterprises and improve performances of individual enterprises and the entire supply chain. Full information sharing for centralized problem solving is, however, difficult to achieve in real supply chains due to reasons such as information privacy of the enterprises, costs of adopting inter-organizational information systems (IOIS) and complexity of the centralized problem. This monograph by Jason Shiu Kong Lau aims at investigating appropriate levels of information sharing, which can yield benefits close to full information sharing. The book deals with - the investigation of appropriate levels of information sharing - the associated coordination methods in three supply chain problems: inventory replenishment, distributed project scheduling and rescheduling - the establishing of a framework for investigating impacts of sharing production information among enterprises in supply chains. Through the use of multi-agent-based approach to modeling supply chains, this book shows that appropriate levels of information sharing performs close to, or even better than full information sharing. This work provides insights to improve performance of the supply chains in which full information sharing and centralized problem solving are not practical. With the aid of Internet and multi-agent technologies, practitioners in small and medium-sized enterprises can reduce barriers and costs of sharing information and, hence, implementing supply chain management.