The impact of behavior-based strategies on supply uncertainty

Abstract

Today's economical environment encompasses a high level of uncertainty, which affects decision makers capability in predicting future events, their occurrence probability and possible decision outcomes. A common way to guard against uncertainty is holding inventory in order to ensuring business continuity and on-time delivery to customer, buffering the effect of the risk. This method belongs to the buffer-oriented techniques that represent only a shield against uncertainty and contribute to raise the overall costs. A more effective way to reduce supply uncertainty is to deeply analyze its sources and try to reduce its occurrence probability adopting behavior-based strategies. A Systems Thinking model, aiming at explaining the logical relationships among different strategies and at analyzing their impact on supply uncertainty and total costs, is presented. © 2010 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.