Solutions to improve performance in the UK house building supply chain - The use of a system dynamics model

摘要

The private house building industry in the UK is plague with problems. Two majorgovernmental reports have shown the need to change and to improve performance if thehouse developers are to survive. In order to assess the potential benefits of usingsupply chain management principles for the house building industry, especially from adynamic point of view, a generic model has been developed and used. This model basedForrester production and distribution systems and on an Inventory and Order BasedProduction Control System (IOBPCS) takes into consideration the developer,merchants and manufacturers.This generic model has been used to model four scenarios for the low-value fit-outsupply chain. The low-value fit-out supply chain focuses on products necessary for theconstruction of the fit-out of a house such as doors, lintels, skirting boards, etc. Thefour scenarios considered are Traditional, Kitter, Integrated Information andSynchronised. Each scenario implement different supply chain management principlessuch as supplier base reduction, total cycle time compression, shared end-customerdemand, etc.The simulation results show that using one single national merchant instead of severalregional merchants reduces demand amplification and total supply chain inventorycosts. Information enrichment also improves performance while the reduction ofmanufacturing lead-times has detrimental effect on the total supply chain inventorycosts.It is concluded that the private house building can improve its performance byimplementing some supply chain management principles.