Analysis of Supplier Quality and Supplier Ontime Delivery on Production Line Performance.pdfVIP

Analysis of Supplier Quality and Supplier On-time Delivery on Production Line Performance Tom McDonald, Alan Hafner, Eileen Van Aken, and Kimberly Ellis Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (0118) Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA Abstract Effective supply chain management continues to increase in both importance and complexity for organizations. Supply chain management requires addressing challenging decision problems related to supply operations, production, and distribution. This study investigates the impact of supplier performance on the performance of a dedicated cellular production line in a make-to-order manufacturing plant. Discrete event simulation is used to examine the inter-relationships among supplier quality, supplier on-time delivery, and production line performance. Performance measures for the production line include on-time delivery, flowtime, number of stock-outs, and length of stock-outs for critical supplied parts. This case study demonstrates how simulation can be used to identify the most significant improvement opportunities for supplier performance issues. Keywords Simulation, Cellular Manufacturing, Supply Chain Management, Supplier Performance 1. Introduction As market and customer expectations change and increase, organizations and managers require more timely responses and more precise information to compete successfully. These expectations have also led to a paradigm shift in that the organization no longer determines the price of the product/service based on their desired profit, but the custo