A formulation for measuring the bullwhip effect within spreadsheets

Resumen

The bullwhip effect refers to the scenario in which orders to the supplier tend to present larger fluctuations than sales to the buyer, and the resulting distortion increasingly amplifies upstream in a supply chain. We propose a transformation of the known formulation by Chen et al. (2000) to calculate the bullwhip effect in a supply chain with the aim of being easily applied through spreadsheets without using VBA macros. We present this formulation modelled with Ms Excel© by using a numerical example.