¹University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA

Correspondence: M Khouja, Business Information Systems and Operations Management Department, The Belk College of Business Administration, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC 28223, USA. E-mail: mjkhouja@email.uncc.edu

Received February 2002; Accepted April 2003.

Abstract

Supply chain management literature calls for coordination between the different members of the chain. Materials should be moved from one supplier to the next according to a just-in-time schedule. In this paper, we show that for many supply chain configurations, complete synchronization will result in some members of the chain being 'losers' in terms of cost. We develop an algorithm for optimal synchronization of supply chains and provide some guidelines for incentive alignment along the supply chain. In developing the model, we use the economic delivery and scheduling problem model and analyze supply chains dealing with single and multiple components. For single-component supply chains, we derive a closed-form expression for the optimal synchronized cycle time. For multi-component supply chains, we develop an algorithm for finding the optimal synchronized cycle time. We test the performance of the algorithm and show that it provides optimal solutions for a wide range of problems. We illustrate the models with numerical examples.