Download or read book Essays on Supply Chain Disruptions written by Mikaella Polyviou and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global and interconnected supply chains have changed the risk profile of organizations by increasing their vulnerability to interruptions in the flow of materials or products within supply chain networks. Such supply chain disruptions have become more frequent and have proven to be damaging both to companies and to society more generally. Considering their negative implications, it is imperative to enhance our scientific understanding of supply chain disruptions and to identify ways to prevent them from occurring or to mitigate their effects when they do occur. In this dissertation, I focus on individuals, who are tasked with disruption resolution, and I examine how they react to supply chain disruptions of varying characteristics. Drawing insights from the Ancient Rhetors, specifically from Aristotle’s `pieces of circumstance’, as well as from contemporary Philosophers that conceptualized `events’, I propose a schema that helps Supply Chain Management scholars and professionals ask the right questions about supply chain disruptions and points to dimensions and characteristics that may be used to describe disruptions more holistically. With this schema, Supply Chain Management scholars and professionals can begin to assess supply chain disruptions more comprehensively, and to examine relationships between disruptions of specific characteristics and any outcomes of interest. Furthermore, utilizing two dimensions that derive from the schema for supply chain disruptions, I proceed to examine the effects of supply chain disruptions, which vary on those dimensions, on buyers’ negative emotions and strategic supplier decisions. I focus on emotions and decisions, because the former have received little attention in Supply Chain Management research; yet, they were shown to be powerful determinants of judgements and decisions in various contexts. Using two scenario-based role-playing experiments across two subject populations, I demonstrate that supply chain disruptions, of varying characteristics, trigger distinct negative emotions in buyers, who are tasked with disruption resolution. Moreover, I show that supply chain disruptions influence buyers’ decisions regarding strategic suppliers both directly and indirectly through negative emotions. Finally, I provide evidence to suggest that negative emotions, which are triggered by supply chain disruptions, influence buyers’ decisions in new contexts that are unrelated to the original context of the disruption. In this way, I demonstrate that buyers are not always acting as rational decision-makers, but they are in fact influenced by their prior experiences and by psychological processes, which spill over to bias buyers’ subsequent decisions.

Download or read book Identifying and Mitigating the Antecedents of Supply Chain Disruptions 3 Essays written by Marco Habermann and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Supply Chain Coordination written by Ruoxuan Wang and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Mitigating Supply Chain Disruptions written by Kathryn Ann Marley and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: Supply chain disruptions create significant cost and operational consequences for manufacturing and service firms. In this research, I address the relationship between lean management and supply chain disruptions by considering the challenges faced by complex systems. Manufacturing plants can be considered complex systems because of the number of interactions that exist in processes and the number of options and level of variety that exists in products. Despite operating complex systems, some firms practicing lean management are able to manage complexity and achieve higher levels of responsiveness, reliability, and adaptability than their competitors. To understand the relationship between managing complexity and reducing supply chain disruptions, I draw on organizational theory that addresses how complex systems, such as nuclear power plants and aircraft carriers, achieve reliability despite operating under dangerous conditions. According to this research, the dimensions of interactive complexity and tight coupling lead to a higher propensity of accidents (Perrow, 1984, 1999). This is because the complexity of systems allows unexpected interactions to occur and tight coupling allows the problems to propagate quickly. Because accidents involve a disruption to the ongoing or future output of a system, I argue that supply chain disruptions that disrupt the ongoing or future output of a manufacturing or service facility may also be more likely when these two conditions exist. I address the relationship between lean management and supply chain disruptions in the form of three related essays. In the first essay, I conceptually address how the Normal Accident Theory (NAT) and High Reliability Theory (HRT) provide insights into why applying lean management principles may reduce the likelihood of supply chain disruptions. In the second essay, I empirically test the ideas central to NAT and HRT with a sample of orders from a steel processing plant. In the third essay, I use the same dataset and suggest that the lean management dimensions of tight coupling and a low level of interactive complexity lead to the lowest number of supply chain disruptions.

Download or read book Essays on Supply Chain Management in Emerging Markets written by Micha Hirschinger and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book In Pursuit of Supply Chain Resilience written by Andrew Zeiser and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Supply chains have grown increasingly global and interconnected over the past decades. Technological advancements have enabled organizations to pursue improved performance while simultaneously reducing costs; all in pursuit of increased profits. However, this same supply chain globalization has amplified companies' risk exposures. These risks lead to increased supply chain disruptions- interruptions in the flow of materials and products between entities in supply chains. At the same time, high-impact disasters- from various causes- are increasing in frequency. For example, evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed how discrete events cause ripples felt across industries and geographies. Therefore, it is essential to improve our understanding of resilience- an organization’s ability to withstand, recover and grow from disruption- not only to further scientific knowledge, but also to provide actionable guidance to our practitioner community. This dissertation examines how organizations respond to disruptions and communicate those disruptions- to partner organizations and public stakeholders. In Chapter 2, we utilize semi-structured interviews to explore how an organization’s capabilities of agility, adaptability, and alignment (AAA capabilities) connect to and enable its resilience. We find empirical evidence suggesting that alignment between and within organizations drives the ability to respond to short-term disruptions (agility) and make long-term adjustments (adaptability). In Chapter 3, we utilize an online scenario-based experiment to assess whether the timing and accuracy of shared disruption-related information influence the relationship between a buyer and supplier. Much of the literature on information sharing during supply chain disruptions assumes that the information transmitted is accurate, an assumption unlikely to be true given the uncertainty surrounding supply chain disruptions. We show that when a supplier shares information quickly, regardless of that information’s accuracy, the buyer has greater trust and willingness to continue the relationship with the supplier. In chapter 4, we collect a unique dataset of qualitative documents to investigate how organizations communicate a sustained component shortage. We find that organizations utilize a broad playbook of communication strategies to broadcast the shortage and their response to that shortage to public stakeholders. Finally, in Chapter 5, we provide conclusions. Each chapter of this dissertation expands the theoretical understanding of how organizations can better respond to disruptions and pursue resilience. Additionally, each chapter offers practical applications for organizations experiencing disruptions.

Download or read book Essays in Supply Chain Management written by Mahesh Nagarajan and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Supply Chain Management written by and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Supply Chain Management written by Yue Jin and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Supply Chain Management written by Bo Hu and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Supply Chain Management written by Ming Jin and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Upstream and Downstream Disruptions Along Nutritional High value Food Supply Chains in Emerging Countries written by Mark Zingbagba and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation presents three essays on disruptions along nutritional high-value food supply chains in emerging countries. It extends our understanding of threats to the attainment of food security in emerging countries. With a contribution to agricultural economics, the dissertation relies on value chain, market growth and price transmission theories and applies both panel data and time series econometric techniques to analyse the sources and magnitudes of the disruption of nutritional high-value food chains.The first part of the dissertation examines disruptions in unprocessed and minimally processed nutritional high-value food markets. Chapter 2 examines upstream and downstream disruptions along these food chains. Chapter 3 extends the analysis in Chapter 2 by assessing how disruptions change when nutritional high-value foods are highly processed. For each of the two chapters, disruptions are studied in terms of changes in upstream and downstream quantities and prices, with the disruption of quantity considered primary while that of prices is secondary.Using the São Paulo food market as a case study, Chapter 4 analyses the effect of diesel price shocks on different segments of the nutritional high-value food supply chain. A Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) that takes into account upstream and downstream cross-price effects is estimated to ascertain if diesel price shocks are higher downstream based on price transmission theory.The results of Chapters 2 and 3 show that climatological disasters are the most dominant source of disruption of nutritional high-value food supply chains and the direction of impact is negative for all foods under study. The magnitude of disruption, however, varies by food. From the VECM results in Chapter 4, we see that the price of diesel has a positive and significant effect on food prices, while the effects downstream are lower than those upstream. These results have significant implications for the design and implementation of food policies in emerging countries.As a general introduction, Chapter 1 justifies the need to study upstream and downstream differences in the magnitude of supply chain disruption, by situating the dissertation in the existing supply chain and food price transmission literature. Chapter 5 concludes the study and offers suggestions for future research.

Download or read book Essays on Supply Chain Management with Model Uncertainty written by Mengshi Lu and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditional supply chain management models typically require complete model information, including structural relationships (e.g., how pricing decisions affect customer demand), probabilistic distributions, and parameters. However, in practice, the model information may be uncertain. My dissertation research seeks to address model uncertainty in supply chain management problems using data-driven and robust methods. Incomplete information typically comes in two forms, namely, historical data and partial information. When historical data are available, data-driven methods can be used to obtain decisions directly from data, instead of estimating the model information and then using these estimates to find the optimal solution. When partial information is available, robust methods consider all possible scenarios and make decisions to hedge against the worst-case scenario effectively, instead of making simplified assumptions that could lead to significant loss. Chapter 1 provides an overview of model uncertainty in supply chain management, and discusses the limitations of the traditional methods. The main part of the dissertation is on the application of data-driven and robust methods to three widely-studied supply chain management problems with model uncertainty. Chapter 2 studies the reliable facility location problem where the joint-distribution of facility disruptions is uncertain. For this problem, usually, only partial information in the form of marginal facility disruption probabilities is available. Most existing models require the assumption that the disruptions at different locations are independent of each other. However, in practice, correlated disruptions are widely observed. We present a model that allows disruptions to be correlated with an uncertain joint distribution, and apply distributionally-robust optimization to minimize the expected cost under the worst-case distribution with the given marginal disruption probabilities. The worst-case distribution has a practical interpretation, and its sparse structure allows us to solve the problem efficiently. We find that ignoring disruption correlation could lead to significant loss. The robust method can significantly reduce the regret from model misspecification. It outperforms the traditional approach even under very mild correlation. Most of the benefit of the robust model can be captured at a relatively small cost, which makes it easy to implement in practice. Chapter 3 studies the pricing newsvendor problem where the structural relationship between pricing decisions and customer demand is unknown. Traditional methods for this problem require the selection of a parametric demand model and fitting the model using historical data, while model selection is usually a hard problem in itself. Furthermore, most of the existing literature on pricing requires certain conditions on the demand model, which may not be satisfied by the estimates from data. We present a data-driven approach based only on the historical observations and the basic domain knowledge. The conditional demand distribution is estimated using non-parametric quantile regression with shape constraints. The optimal pricing and inventory decisions are determined numerically using the estimated quantiles. Smoothing and kernelization methods are used to achieve regularization and enhance the performance of the approach. Additional domain knowledge, such as concavity of demand with respect to price, can also be easily incorporated into the approach. Numerical results show that the data-driven approach is able to find close-to-optimal solutions. Smoothing, kernelization, and the incorporation of additional domain knowledge can significantly improve the performance of the approach. Chapter 4 studies inventory management for perishable products where a parameter of the demand distribution is unknown. The traditional separated estimation-optimization approach for this problem has been shown to be suboptimal. To address this issue, an integrated approach called operational statistics has been proposed. We study several important properties of operational statistics. We find that the operational statistics approach is consistent and guaranteed to outperform the traditional approach. We also show that the benefit of using operational statistics is larger when the demand variability is higher. We then generalize the operational statistics approach to the risk-averse newsvendor problem under the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) criterion. Previous results in operational statistics can be generalized to maximize the expectation of conditional CVaR. In order to model risk-aversion to both the uncertainty in demand sampling and the uncertainty in future demand, we introduce a new criterion called the total CVaR, and find the optimal operational statistic for this new criterion.

Download or read book Essays on Supply Chain Management written by Juan Camilo Serpa and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays in Supply Chain Management with Demand Dependencies written by Kunpeng Li and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Product demand is an important component of business research. The formulation of demand functions is fundamental in model setups, and can be a direct factor in model results. Demand dependency is an important area in the study of demand functions. This dissertation fits in the demand dependency literature, where many interesting industrial phenomena have been explored, but many others have not yet been studied. In addition, the existing literature mainly focuses on pricing models. Very little has been done on quality design and analysis. This dissertation includes quality as a decision variable in various demand dependency models, investigates some interesting business scenarios, and provides insights to many managerial issues.

Download or read book Essays on Supply Chain Coordination written by Valery Pavlov and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on the Interface of Supply Chain and Project Management written by Xin Xu and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.