Supply chain management analysis: a simulation approach to the Value Chain Operations Reference (VCOR) model

The impact of globalisation and worldwide competition has forced firms to modify their strategies towards a real-time operation with respect to customers' requirements. This behaviour allows the top management to move towards the concept of an extended enterprise in which a collaborative link is established among suppliers, commercial partners and customers. When the information flows involve each actor of the chain, from suppliers to the final distribution centres, the extended enterprise becomes a virtual firm, which can be defined as a set of stand-alone operational units that acts to reconfigure themselves as a value chain in order to adapt to the business opportunities given by the market. The present work is intended to verify through a simulation approach the quantitative advantages obtained by the introduction of the value chain concept into the Supply Chain Management (SCM). The paper, after a description of the two most well-known SCM models – the Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) and Value Chain Operations Reference (VCOR) – makes a comparison from the customer's point of view. In the second part of the work, a simulation model is developed to verify the advantage that the VCOR model is able to obtain, validating it on an industrial case study.