MANAGING VENDOR INVENTORY IN A DUAL LEVEL DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM

Collaborative arrangements among members of the supply chain have received a great deal of interest in recent years as a means of reducing costs. One such arrangement is vendor managed inventory (VMI). VMI allows the vendor to make decisions concerning the quantity and timing of deliveries to the retailer. Such an arrangement offers the potential of a more efficient supply chain by removing the negative effects of retail ordering policies. A thorough review of the literature was conducted to identify factors likely to impact the performance of a VMI partnership. Computer simulation was used to study the effects of these factors from both the vendor's and retailer's perspectives. The results lend insight into the performance of VMI and guidance for managers as to the environments in which VMI is most effective.     

AN ANALYSIS OF FACTORS AFFECTING CROSS DOCKING OPERATIONS

Using simulation, we examine the decisions in moving freight between inbound and outbound trailers in a cross dock. The decisions examined include direct versus indirect handling of pallets, number of open receiving doors, door layout, number of forklifts, size of cross dock and freight mix. This study provides useful insights on handling freight in a cross dock.     

Perceptions of Workplace Spirituality among Professionals and Executives

As a new century begins, it is becoming increasingly clear that workers are experiencing a fundamental change of business world values, a change of paradigms as radical as the Age of Information. Corporate America and its employees are responding to a call for a deeper sense of purpose, a more significant sense of faith, and a renewed commitment to spirituality. This paper reports research that focuses on the relationship among the 3 key stakeholders in this new emphasis on spirituality: individual, organization, and work unit. Significant correlations were found to exist among 3 factors of spirituality and among 11 variables that were submeasures of the factors.     

The ‘Neighbourhood Effect’: A multidisciplinary assessment of the case for farmer co-ordination in agri-environmental programmes

In this paper we present a multi-disciplinary analysis of the potential impacts of undertaking similar environmental actions on multiple farms in a small geographic area, using organic farming as a proxy for a co-ordinated approach. Recent papers have called for more co-ordinated efforts between farmers in terms of their environmental actions, but there has been limited applied research demonstrating the environmental benefits or the economic and social implications to farmers of this approach. Comparative analysis of biodiversity, soil and water, and farm profitability were undertaken in England on 32 matched farms in areas of low and high organic farming concentration; qualitative interviews were also conducted with 48 farmers living in two of the eight areas. Findings demonstrate higher overall levels of biodiversity on organic farms (particularly in “hotspot” areas) but this was not universal across the species groups investigated. Higher water infiltration rates were found in organic grasslands, which could prove to be a useful measure to combat flooding. In terms of the technical efficiency of producing these environmental gains, conventional and organic farms in hotspot areas demonstrated equivalent efficiency from a financial perspective. Socio-cultural research identified the different amounts of trust farmers have in their neighbours, based in part on their performance as ‘good farmers’. We discuss the neighbourhood effect with a multi-disciplinary approach and conclude that encouraging local farmer co-ordination can have clear environmental benefits without high economic cost, but must be undertaken with caution - specifically regarding the trade-offs between benefits, local geophysical and social characteristics, and assumptions made about inter-farmer trust.     

Multi-stakeholders’ assessment of bike sharing service quality based on DEMATEL–VIKOR method

ABSTRACT

Bike sharing is a sustainable mode of urban transportation. Assessing the perceived service quality is essential to improve the development of bike sharing. Most of the existing research evaluates the service quality of bike sharing only from the perspective of its users. This study assesses the perceived quality gap among four different stakeholders including government regulators, platform operators, bike association and users. First, an evaluation criteria system consisting of sixteen criteria obtained from the five dimensions of tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy is constructed based on a revised service performance model. Thereafter, a hybrid multi-criteria decision-making model that combines Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) with VIsekriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR) is proposed. Then, the model is applied to evaluate the service quality of bike sharing in Xi’an City. Finally, some useful suggestions are given to improve the bike sharing service quality from the perspective of multi-stakeholders.     

Solvency II: stability problems with the SCR aggregation formula

One of the central issues in the Solvency II process will be an appropriate calculation of the Solvency Capital Requirement (SCR). This is the economic capital that an insurance company must hold in order to guarantee a one-year ruin probability of at most 0.5%. In the so-called standard formula, the overall SCR is calculated from individual SCRs in a particular way that imitates the calculation of the standard deviation for a sum of normally distributed risks (SCR aggregation formula). However, in order to cope with skewness in the individual risk distributions, this formula must be calibrated accordingly in order to maintain the prescribed level of confidence. In this paper, we want to show that the methods proposed and discussed thus far still show stability problems within the general setup.     

Ein Reservierungsverfahren für die Rechtsschutzversicherung nach Art der Lebensversicherung

In this paper we introduce a new approach to the calculation of claims reserves (known and IBNR cases) which is particularly adapted to the business model of legal expense insurance. An essential aspect here is the split into two model components: case numbers and average claim costs. In contrast to other reserving methods for case numbers and claims cash flows which are frequently used in practice without checking the validity for application we introduce a model in which the time until case settlement is described by a lifetime distribution according to the principles of life insurance. The split of model components also allows for a simple implementation of cost inflation effects which is required by German law. Finally, the approach proposed here can readily be transferred to the calculation of IBNR reserves.     

The Third Eye: Exploring Guanxi and Relational Morality in the Workplace

We examine the use of Confucian relational morality as an alternative reference point to that of modernist morality in judging workplace ethical conduct. A semi-structured interview based study involving 46 ethnic Chinese managers and 30 non-Chinese expatriate managers in Singapore, provided evidence of the use of traditional guanxi-linked morality as a moral resource by some of the former group in judging workplace ethical dilemmas. While such morality played only a minor role in moral reasoning, and was largely overshadowed by modernist morality, the research nonetheless demonstrates that moral reasoning reflects wider cultural heritage, and is not merely a function of corporate culture and individual moral development.     

Inequality and Economic Growth: A Global View Based on Measures of Pay

This paper discusses two issues in the relationship betweeninequality and economic growth: the data and the econometrics.We first review the income inequality data set of Deiningerand Squire (D&S), which, we argue, fails to provide eitheradequate or accurate coverage, whether through time or acrosscountries. We then introduce our own measures of the inequalityof manufacturing pay, based on UNIDO's Industrial Statistics.These provide indicators of pay inequality that are more stable,more reliable and in our view also more comparable across countries,than the D&S data. Turning to the fabled "Kuznets" relationship between inequalityand economic development, we diagnose several common econometricproblems in the literature, including measurement error andomitted variable bias. By taking steps to account for theseproblems, and by introducing a more complete panel data setbased on pay inequalities, we seek more reliable inferencesconcerning the relationship between inequality, national incomeand economic growth. We find evidence that generally supportsKuznets' specification for industrializing countries: pay inequalitytends to decline as per capita income increases, though withsome tendency for the relationship to curve up for the richestcountries. After 1981 two findings emerge. First, per capitaGDP growth slowed dramatically in most countries, increasinginequality along the augmented Kuznets curve. Second, thereis a global and macroeconomic effect that produces rising inequalityin our data, independent of GDP or its changes. The timing ofthis effect suggests a link to the high real interest ratesand global debt crisis of the period beginning in 1982. (JELC23, D31, J31, O11)