Supply Chain Strategies: Changes in Customer Order‐Based Production

Supply chain development is debated in terms of whether lean and agile supply chain strategies will work simultaneously and whether “leagile” strategies are possible. This study explores complexity and dynamics of the mixed strategy in a longitudinal automotive industry case study and contributes with four propositions related to the debate and practices of supply chain strategies.     

Supply Chain Performance Based on the Lean–Agile Operations and Supplier–Firm Partnership: An Empirical Study on the Garment Industry in Indonesia

The purpose of this study is to explore how lean–agile operations and supplier–firm partnership can improve garment small and medium enterprise (SME) supply chain performance. This study is based on cross‐sectional survey research that provides longitudinal evidence to show how lean–agile operations and partnership strategy influence supply chain and garment SME performance. To clarify the relationships among these constructs, structural equation model (SEM) is conducted to examine the model fit and the five hypotheses. The result shows that agile supply chain and partnership strategy are critical for garment SMEs because these strategies influence their supply chain performance. However, the leanness strategy does not necessarily influence their supply chain performance. The supply chain performance and partnership strategy have a positive influence on the SME performance.     

Lean Implementation in Small and Medium‐Sized Enterprises in Less Developed Countries: Some Empirical Evidences From North Africa

The purpose of this paper is to provide an exploration and analysis of lean implementation in small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in less developed countries. Therefore, exploratory empirical evidences were collected from a survey study among a sample of 84 SMEs in North Africa. Moreover, statistical tests were conducted to assess the overall picture of lean among SMEs in this region. Although SMEs have expressed their immense need for lean, the level of its implementation is found to be very low. The findings could encourage further extensive studies to develop strategies to promote the use of lean in these countries.     

一体化供应链组合战略的构建

随着供应链之间竞争的加剧,单一地采用精细思想和敏捷思想设计供应链已经不能满足客户的要求。只有合理地运用精细思想和敏捷思想的组合战略,才能使供应链能够同时达到满足终端顾客的产品可获性和有能力购买性的双重需求。同时,使用模块化设计能够降低供应链组合策略的复杂性,增强供应链的适用性和通用性,使供应链结构变得简单化。     

Remote agile: Problems,solutions, and pitfalls to avoid

In response to increasing uncertainty and rapid change, firms are looking to implement new management methods to become more flexible and less hierarchical. One of the most popular of these methods is to be agile, which aims for reactiveness, collaboration, decentralized decision-making, and increased autonomy. However, agile was designed to work best with teams in which members are colocated, whereas during the COVID-19 pandemic—and likely in the post-COVID world—many employees are working remotely at least part of the time. We explore how to adapt agile to remote work, drawing from an in-depth case study of OP Financial Group, the largest bank in Finland. We highlight five problems and solutions to implementing agile in a remote setting and discuss the situations and types of teams in which remote agile will likely work and not work. Our findings provide guidance for companies looking to become agile in today’s new normal.     

Home-owned versus foreign-owned firms in the UK automotive industry: Exploring the microfoundations of ambidextrous production and supply chain positioning

The UK automotive industry is home to a large number of foreign firms, demonstrating the open nature of competition. However, the industry necessitates both exploitative and explorative capabilities. Contingency theory suggests that firms align their internal structure with contextual factors. As such, the aims of this study were to investigate whether it was possible to distinguish home-owned (UK) and foreign-owned firms based upon: a) the microfoundations of ambidextrous production, which are conceptualised as lean and agile routines; and b) the tier at which these firms operate in the automotive supply chain. Survey data were collected from 85 home-owned and 55 foreign-owned firms within the UK Midlands automotive industry. Logistic regression results revealed that home-owned firms were significantly more likely to be implementing explorative (agile) production methods, whereas foreign-owned firms were significantly more likely to be implementing exploitative (lean) production. Home-owned and foreign-owned firms were found to be significantly more likely to be operating upstream and downstream in the automotive supply chain respectively. Thus, the findings support a contingency theory explanation, suggesting that firms align their performance priorities with contextual factors, but we argue that home-owned and foreign-owned firms have evolved to compete based on their different innovative capabilities, which are located at different tiers of the automotive supply chain. On this basis, although neither home-owned nor foreign-owned firms were found to be endogenously ambidextrous, we argue that foreign-owned firms internationalise into the UK automotive sector to exploit the explorative capabilities acquired by home-owned firms operating upstream in automotive supply chains, thus enabling ambidextrous capabilities at an exogenous, industrial level.     

A NONZERO‐SUM GAME APPROACH TO CONVERTIBLE BONDS: TAX BENEFIT,BANKRUPTCY COST,AND EARLY/LATE CALLS

Convertible bonds are hybrid securities that embody the characteristics of both straight bonds and equities. The conflicts of interest between bondholders and shareholders affect the security prices significantly. In this paper, we investigate how to use a nonzero‐sum game framework to model the interaction between bondholders and shareholders and to evaluate the bond accordingly. Mathematically, this problem can be reduced to a system of variational inequalities and we explicitly derive the Nash equilibrium to the game. Our model shows that credit risk and tax benefit have considerable impacts on the optimal strategies of both parties. The shareholder may issue a call when the debt is in‐the‐money or out‐of‐the‐money. This is consistent with the empirical findings of “late and early calls.” In addition, the optimal call policy under our model offers an explanation for certain stylized patterns related to the returns of company assets and stocks on call.     

敏捷成像卫星需求筹划系统应用探析

作为一类具有大范围、快速机动能力的对地观测卫星,敏捷成像卫星在提高卫星观测效率的同时,也使得卫星需求的筹划与调度变得更加的复杂和困难,给卫星需求筹划技术带来了新的挑战。针对敏捷成像卫星的多种特殊工作模式,分析了敏捷成像卫星需求筹划的技术特点和约束条件,从工程应用实际出发,建立了一套基于复杂需求分解和动态规划调整的敏捷卫星地面需求筹划系统,并根据实际的应用需求,给出了相应的应用实例,最后进一步展望了未来敏捷成像卫星需求筹划的发展方向。     

On automated e‐business negotiations: Goal,policy, strategy,and plans of decision and action

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in automated e‐business negotiations. The automation of negotiation requires a decision model to capture the negotiation knowledge of policymakers and negotiation experts so that the decision‐making process can be carried out automatically. Current research on automated e‐business negotiations has focused on defining low‐level tactics (or negotiation rules) so that automated negotiation systems can carry out automated negotiation processes. These low‐level tactics are usually defined from a technical perspective, not from a business perspective. There is a gap between high‐level business negotiation goals and low‐level tactics. In this article, we distinguish the concepts of negotiation context, negotiation goals, negotiation strategy, and negotiation tactics and introduce a formal decision model to show the relations among these concepts. We show how high‐level negotiation goals can be formally mapped to low‐level tactics that can be used to affect the behavior of a negotiation system during the negotiation process. In business, a business organization faces different negotiation situations (or contexts) and determines different sets of goals for different negotiation contexts. In our decision model, a business policymaker sets negotiation goals from different perspectives, which are called goal dimensions. A negotiation policy is a functional mapping from a negotiation context to some quantitative measures (or goal values) for the goal dimensions to express how competitive the policymaker wants to reach that set of goals. A negotiation expert who has the experience and expertise to conduct negotiations would define the negotiation strategies needed for reaching the negotiation goals. Formally, a negotiation strategy is a functional mapping from a set of goal values to a set of decision‐action rules that implement negotiation tactics. The selected decision‐action rules can then be used to control the execution of an automated negotiation system, which conducts a negotiation on behalf of a business organization.     

敏捷供应链管理及其在中国的应用

本文在分析敏捷供应链管理机理的基础上,提出了敏捷供应链管理系统的优势和实施步骤,阐释了在我国实施敏捷供应链管理系统的障碍因素及可行性措施。     

QUALITY,OPERATIONAL LOGISTICS STRATEGY,AND REPURCHASE INTENTIONS: A PROFILE DEVIATION ANALYSIS

Emerging thoughts on quality suggest that three principal sources of customer‐based value creation exist for firms operating in the online marketplace. These include a focus on delivering (1) service quality, (2) product quality, and (3) eBusiness quality. Drawing on strategic choice theory coupled with configuration theory, we conducted a profile deviation analysis among customers of online grocery firms using the “ideal” quality profile for four operational logistics strategies as the benchmark (semi extended strategy, fully extended strategy, de‐coupled strategy, and centralized extended strategy). The findings suggest that service, product, and eBusiness quality‐based fit with operational logistics strategy type are associated with customers' behavioral (repurchase) intentions. This lends support to the notion that capitalizing on the appropriately weighted quality‐focus represents a strategic vehicle to create superior outcomes in online businesses. The makeup of these ideal quality profiles that represent the strongest repurchase intentions of customers is also provided.     

Causal Ambiguity in Lean Production Implementation in Malaysia

The success of the lean production system in Japan has led other companies to attempt to adopt it. Yet lean production system initiatives have seen a low success rate. This study draws on the theory of causal ambiguity and its role in the transfer of knowledge to argue that causal ambiguity can impede interfirm transfer of knowledge during lean production system implementation. The authors argue that causal ambiguity undermines motivation during lean production system implementation. Several variables are proposed as moderating the relationship. The findings of a survey are presented here.     

Translating strategy into action: The importance of an agile mindset and agile slack in international business

There is growing recognition that agility, the ability to respond quickly, is essential for international business (IB) in times of daunting challenges. Drawing on the resource-based view, we argue that agility is more than a capability and therefore should be investigated from a broader perspective. The current study offers insights for the IB literature by introducing agile resources (mindset and slack) as drivers of marketing strategy effectiveness capability. An agile mindset drives firms to seek out and introduce new management methods and approaches by encouraging their members to be alert to new and innovative ways of doing things. Agile slack refers to unutilized resources that can be quickly deployed in new strategic initiatives. An analysis of survey data from 179 managers via structural equation modeling shows that an agile mindset and agile slack strongly drive marketing strategy effectiveness capability. Marketing strategy effectiveness is a crucial driver of international performance. Nevertheless, the results suggest that while agile resources are important drivers of marketing strategy effectiveness, they do not influence performance directly. Hence, a firm’s ability to exploit resources through capabilities is critical, and to be truly agile, firms must invest in agile slack resources. Managers are advised to improve their firm’s effectiveness and performance by adopting an agile mindset while relying on agile slack resources.     

Positioning strategies and congruence in the positioning of high‐end indigenous and foreign retailers in sub‐Saharan Africa: An illustration from Ghana

This article examines the employment of positioning strategies through the lens of international retailing for assessing congruence in the positioning of both indigenous and foreign retailers in Ghana. Six retailers—three indigenous and three foreign—are examined in a triangulated method, each through an in‐depth case study. The results show that the dominant positioning strategies consistently pursued by both indigenous and foreign retailers in Ghana are “service,” “reliability,” and “attractiveness.” Although indigenous retailers (relative to their foreign counterparts) employ more strategies, the majority of foreign retailers exhibit close‐to‐ideal congruence among managers' intentions, actual practice, and customers' perceptions. The findings show that foreign and indigenous retailers pursue varying positioning strategies in the marketplace, further complementing the utility of Western‐developed typologies of positioning strategies in a sub‐Saharan African marketplace. Moreover, the results reveal how indigenous retailers have embraced branding, further attesting to the changing and competitive nature of the Ghanaian marketplace.     

How do countries respond to anti‐dumping filings? Dispute settlement and retaliatory anti‐dumping

Empirical studies have found that countries may respond strategically to the anti‐dumping petition filed against their exporters through their own retaliatory actions. Although most previous studies have focused on retaliatory anti‐dumping filings, in this paper we explore another potential avenue for strategic response—filing a complaint under the World Trade Organization's (WTO ) dispute settlement understanding. Using a panel of global anti‐dumping filings between 1995 and 2011, we analyse under what conditions countries will choose to retaliate through either an anti‐dumping petition or a WTO dispute, and to what degree these two strategies are complementary or act as substitutes. We find statistical evidence that countries are more likely to file a WTO dispute when they have also filed a retaliatory anti‐dumping petition, suggesting that these two strategies may be complementary.     

Can Mergers to Monopoly,Price Fixing,and Market‐Division Agreements Raise Welfare?

Naked market division, price fixing agreements and mergers which result in dominant positions have long been opposed by the courts and the government because of the high likelihood that they will result in a reduction in output and an increase in price. We show that the opposite may be true if the market is characterized by marketing spillovers. When marketing investment is required to educate consumers about the general capabilities or qualities of a product, marketing efforts by one producer will benefit rival producers. A theoretical model of these types of markets shows that marketing spillovers can forestall entry altogether or force incumbent firms to engage in ‘limit marketing’ that leaves the market underserved from a welfare‐maximizing perspective. Under these circumstances, market output and social welfare are potentially raised not only through horizontal agreements among competitors, but also through cost‐raising strategies and commitments to predatory behavior by incumbent firms.     

Enhancing CSCW with Advanced Decision Making Tools for an Agile Manufacturing System Design Application

Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) can provide an efficient decision-making environment for multi-disciplinary teams faced with the challenge of evaluating agile manufacturing systems. In this paper, the development and evaluation of CSCW prototypes to aid the systematic evaluation of agile manufacturing systems are described. An industrial case study involving the evaluation of alternative design configurations of a cellular manufacturing system (CMS) for agile manufacturing was used for testing with twelve multi-disciplinary teams. The results obtained suggest that engineering design teams can obtain productivity improvements through the use of CSCW tools. The results indicate that CSCW systems can assist decision-makers in reaching consensus especially when advanced decision making tools are incorporated into the problem-solving framework. In this study, we also found that an enhanced CSCW with a neural network module for preference aggregation outperformed a basic CSCW in: (1) decision quality, (2) users' satisfaction and agreement, (3) consensus. These results also have far reaching implications for distributed product development teams that face the problem of reaching consensus on a range of alternative designs with stringent pressures to reduce development time.     

Managing the transition to the new agile business and product development model: Lessons from Cisco Systems

Through an in-depth case study of Cisco Systems, this Executive Digest finds that companies face two broad challenges when transitioning to the agile product development model. The first is identifying and helping business units and engineering teams adopt this method; the second is developing new management practices that are compatible with and can sustain the agile development practices. Although extant literature has conducted many analyses on these two challenges, there still exist gaps in the research of the agile development method. Herein, we explore how Cisco Systems addressed these two challenges followed by a discussion of the broad implications of adopting the agile development method. This research deepens our understanding of how to adopt and lead the agile development process.     

The Profitability of Option‐Based Contrarian Strategies: An Empirical Analysis

Short‐selling restrictions limit investors' opportunities to profit from contrarian strategies in equity markets. We examine the proposition that incorporating options into contrarian strategies constitute a viable alternative to investors when short‐selling restrictions are in place. In particular, we combine equities with the call and put options traded on the Australian Stock Exchange to investigate the profitability of contrarian strategies in the hybrid market and options market alone. We assess the practical issues in the execution of these approaches, including testing for the effects of limited liquidity and transaction costs. We also investigate how fundamental factors (such as dividend yield, firm size, book‐to‐market ratio, earnings per share, price‐earnings ratio, value stocks, and market conditions) affect contrarian portfolios. The results show that employing options can enhance the profitability of contrarian strategies under certain market conditions.