Regulating B2B online reverse auctions through voluntary codes of conduct

In response to real and perceived abuse by market makers, buyers, and sellers, some industry trade groups representing suppliers have developed voluntary codes of conduct, white papers, and other forms of guidance for online reverse auction participants. The intent of these guidelines is to improve both the reverse auction process and relationships between buyers and sellers. This paper examines the rationale for creating guidelines and codes of conduct, and examines their efficacy in regulating reverse auctions to achieve improved outcomes for market makers, buyers, and sellers. Data from primary and related secondary sources indicate that industry-specific codes of conduct and guidelines have not had a favorable impact.     

A global supply chain framework

The relationship between supply chain competencies and performance has been somewhat elusive. The 21st Century Logistics framework, developed at Michigan State University is currently assessed as to its global relevance, particularly relating to performance. A sample of U.S. firms is compared to a sample of Australian and New Zealand firms to assess the robustness of the framework across different business environments as well as to better understand the supply chain competencies/performance relationship. Results suggest that the framework is reasonably robust across environments, although some improvements in future versions of the framework are suggested. Additionally, results confirm that supply chain competencies do lead to improved performance. Interestingly, supply chain competencies appear to be employed in different ways to create different performance advantages across the various business environments.     

Moderating the impact of global sourcing on inventories through supply chain management

In recent years, companies have paid growing attention to supply chain management at a global level. With regard to the upstream part of the supply chain, the need for better suppliers, the research into specific competences and concerns related to international competition have forced companies to improve their ability to cope with suppliers located in different countries around the world. The literature suggests that the geographical distance of suppliers should create higher inventory levels primarily because of longer and more uncertain lead times. However, as this paper aims to demonstrate, companies can limit this effect by means of specific investments in the supply chain and in their relationships with suppliers. The empirical analysis is based on data from the last edition of the International Manufacturing Strategy Survey (IMSS). The results show that companies performing global sourcing have invested in supply chain management (SCM) and that this has been helpful in keeping their inventories under control.     

An institutional analysis of supply chain innovations in global marketing channels

The adoption of sophisticated supply chain innovations by trading partners in global channels of distribution is often limited by the institutional context of the international transaction. In particular, the regulatory, normative, and cultural-cognitive elements of institutional environments around the world can enhance or inhibit the ability of trading partners to craft the contractual, ownership, and social elements of institutional arrangements required by an innovation. Because supply chain innovations often require costly, new investments and activity sets, firms may be reluctant to participate in an innovation unless a new institutional arrangement can be crafted to provide adequate safeguards and guarantees. A conceptual model is developed to explain the role of institutions in the successful deployment of supply chain innovations in global marketing channels.     

Decision models in global supply chain management

Integrative decision making is key to effective supply chain management (SCM). This article examines five illustrative supply chain decision models that demonstrate the importance of integrating the decisions across the supply chain. The models that are discussed illustrate the diversity of analytical approaches and their usefulness in managing global supply chain issues. The paper identifies potential areas of additional research where analytical modeling can generate useful insights. The paper also presents a short categorization of decision models from literature.     

Strategic marketing in global supply chains: Four challenges

Supply chain management has emerged as a critical arena in which firms can find significant cost reduction opportunities, giving them a cost advantage over competitors. When supply chain management orientations are adopted by several firms in a supply chain, together they can significantly reduce supply chain costs pitting supply chain against supply chain. However, the pursuit of cost savings opportunities is not the only objective of supply chain management. Superior supply chain management can facilitate marketing strategy and lead to the creation of superior customer value, satisfaction, and loyalty, which in turn lead to improved product profit margins, overall firm profitability, and overall corporate growth. However, marketing strategy is problematic in global supply chains. Specifically, four significant strategic marketing challenges exist that relate to the development and execution of marketing strategy in global supply chains. This article draws attention to these challenges to stimulate managerial and research efforts that will move marketing strategy through the 21st century.     

Internet-enabled coordination in the supply chain

The Internet fosters the integration of business processes across the supply chain by facilitating the information flows necessary for coordinating business activities. However, the Internet also supports the use of market mechanisms, such as auctions, that foster price competition. Using market mechanisms is less likely to generate a sustainable competitive advantage, but they might offer the opportunity to purchase some items at a lower price. Managers have the challenge of selecting the Internet-enabled coordination mechanism that best fits the needs of a variety of business situations in the supply chain. The authors present a framework to assist managers with this decision.     

Matter over mind: When specific asset investment affects calculative trust in supply chain partnership

This study, using the concept of trust defined as calculative, risk-related, and relationship-based, examines the relationships between bilateral specific asset investments and after-investing trust. The findings indicate that a firm's trust in their supply chain partner is highly associated with both sides' specific asset investments. It also signifies that the replaceability of a respondent firm moderates the positive relationship between the partner's specific asset investment and trust. Our data has proven that the calculative-based trust theory has better explaining power with the transaction cost analysis (TCA) variables than the knowledge-based trust theory.     

Agility index in the supply chain

To achieve a competitive edge in the rapidly changing business environment, companies must align with suppliers and customers to streamline operations, as well as working together to achieve a level of agility beyond individual companies. Consequently, agile supply chains are the dominant competitive vehicles. Embracing agile supply chain requires asking some important questions, namely: what exactly is agility and how can it be measured? Moreover, how can agility be effectively achieved and enhanced? Due to the ambiguity of agility assessment, most measures are described subjectively using linguistic terms. Thus, this study develops a fuzzy agility index (FAI) based on agility providers using fuzzy logic. The FAI comprises attribute’ ratings and corresponding weights, and is aggregated by a fuzzy weighted average. To illustrate the efficacy of the method, this study also evaluates the supply chain agility of a Taiwanese company. This evaluation demonstrates that the method can provide analysts with more informative and reliable information for decision.     

Modeling defaults of companies in multi-stage supply chain networks

The interest in supply chain networks and their analysis as complex systems is rapidly growing. The physical approach to the topic draws on the concept of heterogenous interacting agents. The interaction among agents is considered as a repeated process of orders and production. The dynamics of production in the supply chain network which we observe is nonlinear due to the random failures in processes of orders and production. We introduce an agent-based model of a supply chain network which represents in more detail the real economic environment in which firms operate. We focus on the influence of local processes on the global economic behavior of the system and study how the proposed modifications change the general properties of the model. We observe collective bankruptcies of firms, which lead to self-emerging network structures. Our results give insight into the dynamics of default processes in supply chain networks, which have important implications both for risk managers and policy makers. Based on the simulations we show that agent-based modeling is a powerful tool for optimization of supply chain networks.     

Mutual impacts of product standardization and supply chain design

This paper deals with two major issues for industries; the product design and the supply chain design. These problems are usually solved separately, but in recent years, approaches were proposed to tackle these two problems together. In this paper, we investigate more precisely the links between the standardization of products or components, and the design of the supply chain. First, we show on a little example that there is a great interest to consider simultaneously these two decisions, and that solving these interdependent problems separately could result in a suboptimal, or even a bad, decision. Then, on a simplified problem issued from an industrial case study, we outline the impact of standardization choices on the structure of the supply chain and the gain that can be obtained from solving the problem as a unique compound optimization model. To illustrate the solutions of the problem, we propose graphics in order to visualize, in function of quantities and/or transportation costs, the best decision for the product standardization and for the supply chain design. Graphics also permit to anticipate the impacts of a variation of either quantities or transportation costs, from a specific situation. Such graphics they could be used in a decision aid tool to help companies in their choices. Finally, we show that costs and supply chain structure are highly impacted.     

Generalized single-vendor multi-buyer integrated inventory supply chain models with a better synchronization

Researchers have synchronized both the single-vendor single-buyer and the single-vendor multi-buyer integrated inventory supply chains by transferring the lot either only with equal-sized or only with unequal-sized sub-lot (batches). However, synchronization by transferring the lot with unequal and/or equal-sized batches (combination of unequal and equal sized batches along with the previous two cases), though available in the former case, the latter one lacks it. Accumulating the inventory in each of the vendor and the buyers, here we develop a generalized single-vendor multi-buyer supply chain model individually by extending the idea of such synchronization, and present logical development of their minimal cost solution techniques. Thereafter, we highlight theoretically the uniqueness of the present techniques by showing the best available methods as their special cases. Special cases are validated with the solutions of some numerical problems. Then their comparative studies with recently developed techniques on two numerical problems are carried out to show significant cost reductions.     

The role of e-marketplaces in supply chain management

Electronic marketplaces (e-marketplaces) have a profound influence on the way in which organizations manage their supply chains. Proponents of the e-marketplace concept suggest that web-based trading systems, such as World Wide Retail Exchange (WWRE) and GlobalNetXchange (GNX), would enable companies to more efficiently buy, sell, and manage their supply chain processes on a global scale. This study investigates the extent to which e-business tools of the e-marketplace are used by channel members in the retail sector for business-to-business supply chain management (SCM). The study is based on a survey involving food service companies, retailers, and wholesalers in the UK. It is shown that the e-marketplace supply chain applications enable the majority of companies to automate transaction-based activities and procurement-related processes rather than strategic supply chain activities. The results also indicate that full participation in e-marketplaces requires companies to integrate their internal and external supply chain activities and share strategic information.     

Short-term financing in a cash-constrained supply chain

In this paper we consider a two-level supply chain with a single retailer and a manufacturer, where both the firms are facing financial constraints and can not produce/order their optimal quantity. Our work shows that a lender who finances the manufacturer has a motivation to finance the retailer as well. Motivated by this, we investigate lender's problem of financing both the firms by making a joint decision on the loan amount and comparing it with the case when lender makes independent decision on loan amount for both the firms. Our numerical study indicates that if one of the firms in the supply chain has sufficiently low cash, joint decision (we refer to it as supply chain financing) may be better not only for the lender but for the retailer and manufacturer as well.     

Dynamic supply chain modeling using a new fuzzy hybrid negotiation mechanism

The key part of dynamic supply chain management is negotiating with suppliers and with buyers. Coordination is essential for successful supply chain management. In order to model coordination among suppliers and buyers in a dynamic supply chain, this paper takes a step further and proposes a new fuzzy- logic-based hybrid negotiation mechanism. In most real-world negotiation situations, agents have a common interest to cooperate, but have conflicting interests over exactly how to cooperate. These situations involve restrictions and preferences that may be vaguely and partly defined. Therefore, this study takes the advantage of fuzzy logic and develops a hybrid negotiation-based mechanism, that combines both cooperative and competitive negotiations. Achieving effective coordination in a multi-agent system is non-trivial as no agent possesses the global view of the problem space. Moreover, the different strategies adopted by agents may produce conflicts. While agents coordinate with each other in the operations, they will negotiate about their strategies to reduce conflicts. The proposed fuzzy hybrid negotiation mechanism allows negotiation agents more flexibility and robustness in an automated negotiation system. The proposed mechanism not only helps sellers and buyers to explore various new choices and opportunities that the e-markets offer but also allows them to identify and analyze their resource constraints in a given schedule, and helps them to explore and exploit many alternatives for a better solution. The efficacy of the proposed approach is demonstrated through an illustrative example.     

Strategic Internet application trends in supply chain management

The Internet is evolving as a powerful force in the new marketplace where the nexus of competition has changed from individual firms to efficient supply chain networks both between firms and within industries. This study explores Internet adoption patterns and operational applications in US supply chain networks. The data reveal that the integration of the Internet into supply chain management applications has increased and has moved away from indiscriminate application of novel Internet technologies towards becoming a focused endeavor with precise expectations and measurable goals. Specifically, the study finds that Internet usage within supply chains is maturing as evidenced by enhanced and increased productivity, reduced costs and increased profit for participating firms.     

Agents’ incentives under buy-back contracts in a two-stage supply chain

This paper investigates how the behavior of individual decision makers can affect the performance of a supply chain. We study a two-stage supplier–retailer system, using a buy-back contract. Each firm's actions are executed by an agent. The retailer's purchasing agent and the supplier's sales agent are compensated based on certain performance measures, and they act accordingly. We study the impacts of their behavior in both the supplier-as-leader and retailer-as-leader settings. We find that, unless their incentives are carefully constructed, the agents can strongly distort the system's behavior. Specifically, “channel stuffing” (packing the distribution channel with excess inventory) can occur in both settings. Only when the agents are compensated based on net profit do they act in accord with their firms’ objectives. These results may help explain some recent scandals.     

The analysis of bullwhip effect in a HMMS-type supply chain

The aim of the paper is to investigate the well-known bullwhip effect of supply chains. Control theoretic analysis of bullwhip effect is extensively analyzed in the literature with the Laplace transform. This paper tries to examine the effect for an extended Holt-Modigliani-Muth-Simon model. A two-stage supply chain (supplier-manufacturer) is studied with quadratic costs functional. It is assumed that both firms minimize the relevant costs. The order of the manufacturer is delayed with a known constant. Two cases are examined: supplier and manufacturer minimize the relevant costs decentralized, and a centralized decision rule. The question is answered, how to decrease the bullwhip effect.     

建筑企业供应链管理中的不确定性研究

对建筑企业供应链管理中的不确定性因素进行了详细的剖析，分析了它们对建筑企业供应链管理的影响，并深入探讨了降低建筑企业供应链管理中不确定性影响的措施。     

Linking product modularity and innovativeness to supply chain management in the Italian furniture industry

Much of the literature on modularity assumes that firms with modular products adopt modular organization. In the realm of supply chain management, no consensus has been reached on the effects of product modularity on supply chains (SC). This paper investigates whether SC choices depend on product modularity and innovativeness, and how SC choices can be aligned to these product features to maximize performance. A medium scale survey has been performed in the Italian furniture industry. By means of factor and cluster analyses, the SC of firms that introduced products with different levels of modularity and innovativeness have been compared. The results show that both product features must be considered when designing the SC.