On the evening of April 9, ZHANG Shenghao, the Doctor of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, gave us a lecture on “The Impact of Advance Order Information and Information Sharing on a Supply Chain with Balanced Ordering” in the third meeting room in ACC.
DR. ZHANG’s main research idea was how the suppliers completed the orders in facing with the uncertain retailers. He said there was a simple way to complete the orders: sending goods to different retailers at different times. But there exited much stock pressure by doing this. Dr. ZHANG invented a new way to solve this problem in two aspects: First, how to obtain information. To address the first question, Professor Zhang said that retailers who wanted goods on Monday should make their orders one day earlier. So the suppliers could reduce a lot of stocks using this information. Information was important to suppliers. This strategy was unfair to retailers but it could optimize the whole supply chain. So the suppliers should give some benefits to retailers to compensate them. Second, the question is how to select retailers to delay delivery. Which retailers would place it ahead of time? According to our experiences, it must be the biggest risk. The bigger the risk, the more valuable the information is. Dr. ZHANG published the results of his empirical research based on this model.
At last, the present teachers and students discussed with Dr. ZHANG with passion. And this lecture made great success.
