Essays on Supply Chain Coordination and Optimization PDF Download

Author: Ju Myung Song
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business logistics
Languages : en
Pages : 138

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Author: Daniel Kern
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3834962279
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Daniel Kern provides an answer on how to implement the theoretical concepts into day-to-day business of multinational corporations through the empirical validation of SCM models and in-depth casestudies. The four essays cover research on inter-firm collaboration, supply risk management, purchasing competences and research on measuring and benchmarking SCM efforts.

Author: Xinjie Shi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 125

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This thesis consists of three separate, but related, essays that deal with the topic of how supply chain structure as well as the use of contracts impact performance of a supply chain. The main focus is the analysis of behavior of indirect-sale supply chains in terms of relative bargaining power and decision rights of the participants. Modeling as Stackelberg games, this thesis explores the existence of Nash equilibriums and the issues surrounding supply chain coordination. In Essay one, "The Role of Decision Structure in Supply Chain Coordination with Stochastic Demand", the analysis focuses on how different supply chain structures affect the choice of contracts in coordination under a generalized setting in which more powerful agent does not necessarily assume the Stackelberg leadership. This study shows that an optimal coordinating contract is based not only upon the overstock liquidation advantage the supplier/retailer may have, but also upon the specific decision hierarchy in the supply chain. In Essay two, "Supply Chain Performance with Power Imbalanced Suppliers", studies the effects of product substitution when suppliers and retailers have an imbalance of decision making power. In particular, we address the questions of structure dominance and why certain supply chain power structures are more stable. Finally, Essay three, "Supply Chain Coordination with Revenue Sharing Contract when Retailer Sells Store-Brand Products", a retailer-dominated supply chain coordination problem is investigated when the retailer sells store-brand products. Among many insights developed, it follows that two-parameter revenue-sharing contracts are preferred to both wholesale-price contacts and one-parameter revenue-sharing contracts in supply chain coordination due to its flexibility in profit division.

Author: Valery Pavlov
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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A supply chain, which typically employs decentralized decision-making, is coordinated if in the equilibrium firms make decisions that are system-wide optimal. Such decisions, called the first-best, would be made if the supply chain were centralized so that a single decision-maker could force all firms to take recommended actions. Under decentralized decision-making, in order to implement first-best one needs to impose a proper structure of incentives. Supply chain literature, building upon developments in mechanism design, proposes various coordination schemes in the applied business contexts. However, the empirical evidence, coming both from the real world and laboratory experiments, confronts many theoretical predictions. In particular, theoretically optimal contracts are notably more complex than those used in the real world. More importantly, in laboratory experiments the theoretically optimal contracts not just fail to coordinate but, ironically, perform very close to the Double Marginalization benchmark. Thus, legitimate concerns regarding ability of the proposed schemes to coordinate in applied contexts arise. This dissertation focuses on some of the factors leading to coordination failures and investigates their impact on the performance of a supply chain. Chapter "Contingent contract" analyzes a scenario when externalities, created by the third parties, force supply chain partners to use contracts contingent on revealed information. Most of the supply chain literature on coordination deals with perfect information models. The assumption of perfect information is usually justified by instances of information sharing, observed in practice. Researchers conjecture that information sharing ensures perfect information. However, there exists empirical evidence that even under the ultimate form of information sharing, when parties implement "open book accounting", revealed information may not be true. Unfortunately, there is always a possibility to misrepresent information. Notably, under perfect information sharing supply chain partners are likely to find themselves in a situation when they essentially have no choice other than to use a contract that delivers first-best provided that "open books" contain truth. The model of this chapter analyzes performance of a supplier-buyer supply chain under the assumption that questioning each other's reports is prohibitively costly, while parties are aware of possible misrepresentation. Therefore, no matter who offers a contract, it cannot be a screening contract or anything else except a contingent contract that delivers "first-best", given revealed information. The outcome of the arising Bayesian game is distribution-specific, and can be very different from the conjectured performance of a "coordinating" contract. Chapter "Fairness and coordination failures in supply chain contracts" addresses a gap between performance of the contracts suggested by the standard theory, which assumes fully rational profit-maximizing players, and existing data, obtained in the experimental tests of coordinating contracts. Numerous experimental studies find that human decision-makers are neither perfectly rational nor profit-maximizers. While various behavioral factors, such as risk- and loss-aversion, counter-factual payoffs and more general social preferences can greatly affect contracting outcomes, they cannot fully explain the existing data. In the controlled laboratory environment, it is possible to either completely eliminate some of these factors, or, at least, to significantly mitigate and control for them. What is not possible to eliminate, is the players' attitude to contracting outcomes, most commonly called "fairness concerns". The existing models, incorporating fairness concerns into models, assume fairness concerns of players is common knowledge. Realistically, how much a particular person cares about fairness cannot be easily observed or measured and, in fact, is not known to anybody else except that person. In other words, fairness concerns are private information. Therefore, the model presented here takes the next step and treats fairness concerns as private information of players. Given the resulting information asymmetry, it is not surprising that coordination of a dyadic channel with a contract is, in general, no longer possible. At the same time, is possible to coordinate a channel with just a wholesale price contract in case the retailer is sufficiently averse to making higher profit than the supplier. However, we show that when the contract choice is endogenous, the supplier will not choose a wholesale price contract but, instead, a profit-maximizing contract that does not coordinate. The results of the experiment that tests the model's predictions, as well as some underlying assumptions and competing theories, provide strong support for the theory and show that fairness organizes the data very well. Chapter "Competition and contracting in supply chains" presents a simple and, in many respects, robust coordination mechanism. Its performance approaches first-best asymptotically in a setting with one supplier and multiple retailers. By introducing horizontal (Bertrand) competition among the retailers the supplier not only induces retailers to make first-best decisions, but also does it by means of the simplest possible linear pricing scheme. Competition does the entire coordinating job, whereas a wholesale price contract suffices to extract all profit of the competing retailers. Although Bertrand competition is not a new concept, little has been known about its actual performance in the contacting context. It turns out that a competition-based mechanism is not only extremely simple, but it is also robust to several relaxations of the standard assumptions, any of which is enough destroy a coordinating contract. First, it survives certain types of information asymmetry. In the extreme example of private information used in this chapter, the mechanism coordinates the channel even if the supplier is not aware of the very fact of private information. Second, Chapter "Fairness and coordination failures in supply chain contracts" shows how fairness concerns generally make coordination of a dyadic channel impossible. However, for the competition-based mechanism fairness concerns is not an obstacle. Turning to the methodological aspects, we would like to note that the mainstream literature suggests coordinating contracts resulting from models that assume the supplier's ability to make a "take-it-or-leave-it" offer. Credibility of such models has been long debated in the literature. Critics insist that the "take-it-or-leave-it" offer is either not a credible threat in the bilateral monopoly or it is a shortcut, implicitly implying perfect competition on the retailers' side. Allowing for competition explicitly not only avoids this criticism but also brings fuller insights, non-available otherwise.

Author: Arvind Sainathan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781109425307
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Author: Ruoxuan Wang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Chain disruptions from power outages, demand is increasing for the temporary power equipment market. We investigate the capacity allocation plan for the supplier providing power rental service to multiple buyers for both planned services (i.e. a large planned event) and unplanned emergency services (i.e. a large disruptive event) in the third essay. We analyze how the resource sharing strategy in capacity planning impacts the profit of supplier and the decision for the buyers in choosing a contracted service or emergency response. Furthermore, the lack of a contract offer from the supplier serves as an indirect signal concerning the availability for capacity of supplier. Finally, we analyze the capacity allocation decision and service planning in terms of profitability.

Author: Xin Xu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business logistics
Languages : en
Pages : 127

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This thesis focuses on the interface of project and supply Chain Management. Supply chain decisions (e.g., material planning, network design, supply management) and project management decisions (e.g., resource planning, expediting, and project scheduling) are intertwined in many firms. The objective of this thesis is to construct and analyze new models and methods that can help firms integrate supply chain and project management. Specifically, we addressed the following issues: (1) Joint optimization of inventory and project planning decisions for recurrent projects subject to random material delays (Chapter 2), often found in construction industries. (2) Designing and managing the development chain for one-of-a-kind R & D projects with an extensive workload outsourced (Chapters 3,4), representing the recent trend in the aerospace and defense industries. In Chapter 2, we study a new class of problems -- recurrent projects with random material delays, at the interface between project and supply chain management. Recurrent projects are those similar in schedule and material requirements. We present the model of project-driven supply chain (PDSC) to jointly optimize the safety-stock decisions in material supply chains and the crashing decisions in projects. We prove certain convexity properties which allow us to characterize the optimal crashing policy. We study the interaction between supply chain inventory decisions and project crashing decisions, and demonstrate the impact of the PDSC model using examples based on real-world practice. In Chapter 3, we study incentive and coordination issues in development chains. Collaboration and partnership are the way of life for large complex projects in many industries. While they offer irresistible benefits in market expansion, technological innovation, and cost reduction, they also present a significant challenge in incentives and coordination of the project supply chains. In this chapter, we study strategic behaviors of firms under the popular loss-sharing partnership in joint projects by a novel model that applies the economic theory of teamwork to project management specifics. We provide insights into the impact of collaboration on the project performance. For a general project network with both parallel and sequential tasks where each firm faces a time-cost trade-off, we find an inherent conflict of interests between individual firms and the project. Depending on the cost and network structure, we made a few surprising discoveries, such as, the Prisoners' Dilemma, the Supplier's Dilemma, and the Coauthors' Dilemma; these dilemmas reveal scenarios in which individual firms are motivated to take actions against the best interests of the project and exactly how collaboration can hurt. As remedy, we enhance collaboration by a set of new provisions into a ``fair sharing" partnership and prove its effectiveness in aligning individual firms' interests with that of the project. In Chapter 4, we extend the model in Chapter 3 in two directions. First, we extend the discrete-time model to a continuous-time model and show that the Coauthor's Dilemma still holds and thus the project will never be finished earlier under the loss-sharing partnership than the centralized control system. Second, we consider stochastic task durations and find that the uncertainty increases the probability of project delay.

Author: Pranava Raja Goundan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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(cont.) In the second part of the thesis, we focus on the design and analysis of simple, possibly non-coordinating contracts in a single-supplier, multi-retailer supply chain where retailers make both pricing and inventory decisions. Specifically, we introduce a buy-back menu contract to improve supply chain efficiency, and compare two systems, one in which the retailers compete against each other, and another in which the retailers coordinate their decisions to maximize total expected retailer profit. In a linear additive demand setting, we show that for either retailer configuration, the proposed buy-back menu guarantees the supplier, and hence the supply chain, at least 50% of the optimal global supply chain profit. In particular, in a coordinated retailers system, the contract guarantees the supply chain at least 75% of the optimal global supply chain profit. We also analyze the impact of retail price caps on supply chain performance in this setting.

Author: Micha Hirschinger
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3658119462
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 135

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Micha Hirschinger emphasizes the importance of foresight on logistics and institutions in particular for effective decision making as distinct research in this context is limited. He applies a systematic and transferable multi-method approach based on Delphi studies and fuzzy c-means cluster analysis to develop profound scenarios for the future. He uses the relevance of information-processing requirements to investigate whether centralization of purchasing organizations increases functional efficiency. The author finally shows how a sharing-economy business model transfer could help to overcome the limited access to factor markets, especially trucks, at the base of the pyramid.

Author: Joseph Geunes
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0387262814
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
Supply Chain Optimization captures the latest results in a segment of current research activity in supply chain management. This research area focuses on applying optimization techniques to supply chain management problems. The research papers that make up the volume provide a snapshot of state-of-the-art optimization methods within the field. This book presents rigorous modelling approaches for supply chain operations problems with a goal of improving supply chain performance (or the performance of some segment thereof). It contains high-quality works from leading researchers in the field whose expertise fits within this scope. The book provides a diverse blend of research topics and novel modelling and solution approaches for difficult classes of supply chain operations, planning, and design problems.