Information Sharing and the Bullwhip Effect Reduction : A new Prespective Through the Lens of Blockchain Technology

Sammanfattning: In recent years, globalization is one of the business trends that forced firms to focus on their essential capabilities, aligned with the surge of competition across many industrial sectors. As a result, businesses act rather as members of a supply chain network, collaborating and coordinating to offer products and services to the ultimate consumers. Yet, the performance of supply chains can significantly be hampered by the dynamics and the lack of efficient coordination among its members. Therefore, investigating the negative impact of the lack of efficient coordination in order to mitigate the effects on the performance of the supply chain has become of significant concern for professionals and academics alike. Lack of efficient information sharing largely depends on the fact that firms consider the information as a company sensitive asset. This in turn causes coordination problems that lead to demand amplification along the supply chain, typically addressed as the bullwhip effect (BWE). Digitalization and computerization have the potential to convert and redesign the structure of supply chains in all kinds of businesses, improve the coordination and transfer real-time information. Specifically, blockchains as a disruptive technology provides disintermediation and decentralization features that give access to shared information only to authorized participants in a supply chain network. Therefore, in this thesis we strive to provide a better understanding of how blockchain technology can contribute towards an information sharing mechanism and, consequently, towards the mitigation of the phenomenon of demand amplification in supply chains. That is, blockchain technology is expected to enable a better coordination between supply chain parties and improve the process of information sharing. The Licentiate thesis highlights the impact of different information sharing aspects on the supply chain performance in terms of Bullwhip effect mitigation and explore the potential of blockchain technology in solving the related barriers to such aspects such as information distortion, lack of trust and decision misalignment. Namely, in this thesis we focus on the use of blockchain technology as an enabler to facilitate sharing real-time information and reduce demand uncertainty among supply chain partners. Three research papers have been produced within this context and are appended to the thesis. Paper A presents a blockchain architecture for information sharing to mitigate the demand information distortion in a service supply chain. Paper B is a systematic literature review exploring the extent of considering the impact of multiple information sharing aspects on the mitigation of the BWE mitigation. Paper C introduces agent-based modeling and simulation approach for two information sharing aspects: “what to share” and “how to share”.  Nine scenarios with heterogenous configurations of a serial supply chain are considered with respect to lead time, initial inventory levels, and three types of information. The results show that blockchain technology does provide a significant solution to trust-based issues and information sharing visibility considering both the bullwhip effect and inventory levels mitigation.