Information Distortion in a Fast Fashion Supply Network: The Impact of Digitalization

During the last decades, Information Sharing has gained a global attention among academic researchers. It has been widely demonstrated that such strategy improves the supply chain management and mitigates the bullwhip effect. In this research, the information distortion and its impact on a Fast Fashion Supply Chain has been modeled. The aim of this paper is to analyze how false data can affect the system performance. A simulation model has been developed in order to reproduce the behavior of the players. Then, different scenarios with different levels of digitalization and distortion have been tested. Results show that both upstream and downstream distortions have a disruptive impact on the system and a strong ripple effect. Moreover, negative effects result to be not linear, and small distortions already show great disruptive effects.