农超对接风险识别与防范对策研究

农超对接试点成功后已经进入全面推广应用阶段,认清农超对接风险隐患对于促进农超对接健康发展具有重要意义。在识别农超对接行为风险、契约风险、市场风险和突发风险四个主要风险源的基础上,分析了农超对接风险的传导路径,最后从农民专业合作社管理和发展、对接平台建设、行业监管和超市社会责任建设三个方面提出了防范对策。     

论社会保障的生命周期及中国的周期阶段

从国家保障、福利国家、强制储蓄和社会保险等主要的社会保障模式中 ,可以看到由产生、成长、高峰、衰退和消亡等阶段组成的社会保障体制的生命周期。中国的新社会保障体制在其生命周期上已经完成产生阶段 ,正处于成长阶段的中期 ,经过另外三十年左右的努力 ,将可以进入高峰阶段。为此 ,中国需要在社会保障体制的改革和建设中对农村保障、养老保障、失业保障和医疗保障诸方面 ,付出一系列特殊而具体的努力     

A hybrid modeling approach for resilient agri-supply network design in emerging countries: Colombian coffee supply chain

Sustainability and resilience in Agri-Food Supply Chains is a challenging topic of current interest in the research community. Resilience for Agri-Food Supply Chain (AFSC) is the capability of the supply network to manage and mitigate disruptions due to global warming and natural phenomena such as landslides and floods of crops, among others caused by humans. A significant challenge is to design efficient and resilient AFSCs in emerging countries while perishability constraints are considered. A methodology to design an AFSC for emerging countries is addressed in this research. The phenomena that aid in identifying critical aspects of the AFSC affecting their resilience are identified. The former approach combines optimization and simulation schemes by considering resilience metrics related to availability and connectivity. Indeed, the solution approach addresses the uncertainty by using simulation of disruptive events and finding resilient designs using mathematical programming. The proposed framework has been evaluated in a Colombian coffee supply chain. The obtained results show the efficiency of the proposed scheme to design AFSCs and allow the practitioners to measure, predict, compare, and improve the level of resilience of their supply chains (SCs).     

供应链环境下的企业物流成本管理初探

当今社会,企业面临的竞争环境越来越激烈。改善物流管理、有效降低物流成本是企业应对挑战的一条可行之路。文中从供应链的角度,对物流成本管理进行了探讨,为企业合理优化物流流程和物流成本管理提供了一种有益的参考。     

The relationship between legitimacy,reputation, sustainability and branding for companies and their supply chains

This paper aims at filling a gap that we perceive to exist in the scientific literature as to legitimacy, reputation and sustainability and their interrelationship to corporate and supply chain branding. A series of innovative theoretical frameworks are provided interrelating companies and their value (supply) chains with legitimacy, reputation, and branding which are essential conditions to achieve sustainability and competitive advantage based on dyadic and social context consonance to the benefit of society and all stakeholders involved. An urgently required better understanding of the concepts and their interrelations is enhanced by a synthesized explanatory basis entailing an eclectic mosaic of interdisciplinary theories (institutionalist, neo-institutionalist theories, the viable system approach, isomorphism and identity) to improve corporate and supply chain performance. To better inform managerial practice the theoretical considerations are spiced with case studies among which especially the currently debated supply chain case of the European horse meat scandal is illuminated suggesting concrete managerial cross-functional implications in the food industry. The paper culminates in the call for a newly to-be-established marketing stream we call ‘Sustainable and Curative Marketing’.     

Supply contract with options

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of an option contract for two companies of a supply chain: retailer and supplier. With an option contract the retailer orders a quantity of units and has the right to modify his order if necessary. A model to calculate the performance of an option contract in terms of contract value for the two companies engaged is presented. The two considered cases are multiple suppliers and one retailer, and one supplier and one retailer. The performance improvement obtained using this kind of contract is compared by simulation.     

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.     

A continuous model for supply planning of assembly systems with stochastic component procurement times

This paper studies a customized product assembly scenario where some components cannot be stocked due to high component cost and risk. We consider the case where these key components are ordered after a demand has been registered with a promised delivery date. Component lead-times are stochastic and associated distribution function is known in advance. The objective is to determine the ordering time for each component such as to minimize the sum of expected holding and backlogging costs. An approach to solve this problem is proposed and the algorithm is tested on a randomly generated data set.     

Three bubbles and a panic: An explanatory review of recent food commodity price events

This paper is a summary of the behaviour of food commodity prices in 2007–2008 and a review of the causes of the price increases, extracted from a report to the Chief Scientific Advisor to Her Majesty’s Government [Thirtle, C., Piesse, J., 2008. An Explanatory Review of the World Food Commodity Price Events of 2007–2008. A Report to the Chief Scientific Advisor. Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, London]. The historical background shows that the price spike was much less severe than in the 1970s. The conventional wisdom that prices of the main food commodities were falling prior to 2006 is questioned. Most ceased falling and were quite stable from the 1980s. The paper separates the causes of the spike from the underlying changes driving the long run trends. The literature on the causes of the spike is critically reviewed and summarised. There is a reasonably broad consensus on most of the causes, but much less on the impact of the depreciation of the US Dollar. There are also concluding speculations on the future.     

Technical efficiency and use of information and communication technology in Spanish firms

The literature concerned with the relationship between performance and information and communications technology (ICT) is usually focused on the ICT investments. This paper shows that it is the level of use of ICT within organisations, with preference as regards the expenses of ICT, which is responsible for the effect on performance. A general sample of 2255 Spanish companies has been used. Firms’ performance is measured as technical efficiency, which is determined by a data envelopment analysis (DEA), in which special attention is paid to the problem of the outliers. Finally, the analysis of the level of use of ICT is focused on a key area of the organisations, the supply chain, which affects the technical efficiency of the firms analysed. Results show that there is evidence of a positive effect of the use of ICT on technical efficiency. This effect is especially notable at intensive use levels in activities related to operations/manufacturing, purchasing or sales.