A Collaborative Cloud Service Platform for Realizing Sustainable Make-To-Order Apparel Supply Chain

Ke Ma, Lichuan Wang and Yan Chen
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Ke Ma: Department of Textile and Clothing Engineering, Soochow University, Suzhou 215021, China
Lichuan Wang: Department of Textile and Clothing Engineering, Soochow University, Suzhou 215021, China
Yan Chen: Department of Textile and Clothing Engineering, Soochow University, Suzhou 215021, China

Sustainability, 2017, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-21

Abstract: As fashion mass customization has been developing rapidly in the recent decade, supply chain in apparel industry was required to be more flexible for meeting the need of quick response toward the dynamic changes in the fashion market. Forecast-based make-to-stock production strategy was not suitable anymore. Make-to-order strategy was employed by more and more apparel companies. However, there were still many defects in traditional make-to-order apparel supply chain, e.g., sustainability is still at a low level. In this study, we proposed a collaborative cloud service platform to develop a novel model of sustainable make-to-order apparel supply chain. A service provider selection heuristic was designed for this platform to optimally select suppliers corresponding to each received demand. Multi-agent-based simulation technology was utilized to build the proposed platform and to evaluate the new sustainable supply chain model. Experiment was conducted in the simulation to compare our new model to traditional apparel make-to-order model and model with outsourcing mechanism. Based on simulation results, the remarkable improvement in terms of sustainability of the proposed platform and corresponding supply chain model was demonstrated.

Keywords: supply chain collaboration; sustainable supply chain; make-to-order; apparel industry; agent-based simulation; optimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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