This thesis explores the role of Inventory Control in Product Service System (PSS) applications within manufacturing contexts. This research led to a new approach for dealing with inventory control and contributes to understanding of the PSS paradigm in manufacturing industries. PSS embraces the product and service continuum as one system; meanwhile, Inventory Control has led to substantial improvements in performance across many industries. PSS and Inventory Control have for many years been recognized in the scientific literature and by industry as enablers of manufacturing operations. Most studies in the field of PSS and Inventory Control have only focussed on its individual scenarios; little is known about where the boundaries of PSS should lie as it needs to integrate both external and internal elements in managing PSS Inventory Control. To date, very little research has been reported related to inventory control in product-service systems from manufacturing operations perspectives. Research has been done in three stages: (1) PSS characteristics were synthesised from the literature; (2) current industry example of PSS inventory were investigated through a survey; four case studies were developed; (3) uncertainty elements were identified from the literature related to the current PSS Inventory Control scenario and these were evaluated, developed and validated producing a generic model. The research carried out involved collecting primary data from qualitative research conducted through four case studies with companies in the United Kingdom and Malaysia; and information from secondary sources; utilising techniques such as survey, interview, matrix and modelling language method. This thesis contributes to the current PSS research by developing a generic model of PSS Inventory Control from manufacturing operations perspectives and a PSS Inventory Control (PSSIC) Framework.

This research investigates how project contracts can coordinate the supply chain between a project manager and contractor and if the solutions can be ensured as equitable. The main features of this type of supply chain are the trade-offs between the selection of a higher rate of resource consumption with a consequent higher cost to the contractor and a lower rate of resource consumption leading to later delivery and a reduction of the project-reward to the project manager. This broader problem could lead to a coordination problem for the overall supply chain. This research proposed a solution to this broader problem in two different scenarios: Take it or leave it scenario and negotiation scenario. Finally, the fair allocation of the risks and benefits and the related decision-making issues are addressed as one of the behavioural barriers to the supply chain coordination. The coordination issues in a take it or leave it scenario are addressed using time-based and fixed price project contracts using Stackelberg games. Models of coordination were proposed with time-based contracts, but the fixed price contracts failed to coordinate. The coordination problems in negotiation scenario are addressed with the Nash's bargaining, the Kalai Smorodinsky bargaining, and the utilitarian approach. A cost plus contract has been found to dominate the solutions over any cost sharing contract and fixed price contract for Nash's bargaining and Kalai Smorodinsky bargaining cases. Finally, the issues of fairness of allocation of risks and benefits as one of the challenges of supply chain coordination, have been investigated. The fixed price contracts were found to coordinate the supply chain under consideration alongside the time-based contracts if the members had fairness concern. Some of the key features of this research include the incorporation of various probability distributions for the project completion time and cost, the inclusion of various forms of risk preference, and addressing the challenges of fair allocation in project supply chains.

In recent years, building Supply Chain Resilience (SCRES) has gained considerable interest as the best way firms can face up to disruptions and gain a competitive advantage. The need for more empirical work on SCRES is well expressed in the literature, but there are few prior empirical studies on SCRES to date; and their focus has been on the developed world, especially Western Europe and North America. Yet, developing countries constitute a significant part of the world population and global supply chains; and there is evidence to believe that developing countries have also faced disastrous effects of supply chain failures. And the current global interconnectedness suggests that such effects can propagate into the developed world. Further, while several potential strategies for improving SCRES have been proposed in the literature, the relationships between them remain ambiguous, with some researchers arguing they are independent and others considering them to be interrelated – meaning they could contradict or reinforce each other, potentially affecting SCRES. This thesis presents findings from the case study of a supply network of 20 manufacturing firms in the developing country of Uganda, to answer the following related questions: what do manufacturing firms in Uganda perceive to be the threats to their supply chains? What strategies do they adopt to build resilience? What are the outcomes of implementing these strategies? The thesis also investigates how the threats and strategies are interrelated, and what it means for SCRES. The findings reveal that the context of a developing country characterised, for example, by weak legal controls and social acceptance of certain customs and practices can produce threats to SCRES like corruption and dishonest employees that are less pronounced in the developed world. It is also found that the threats to SCRES are mainly chronic and endogenous events rather than the exogenous discrete, large-scale catastrophic events typically emphasised in the literature. This study initially applies Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) theory to interpret the data, which shows how environmental conditions, supply chain threats, and resilience strategies are inherently inter-related. This proves to be a useful theory frame – it emerges that the systemic nature of the threats to SCRES and of the strategies for dealing with these threats clearly produces non-linear and non-stationary outcomes. But it was also found that these systemic relationships among threats, strategies and their outcomes are explained by the context in which the supply chain is situated. Hence an embeddedness perspective was adopted to show that the political, cultural and territorial embeddedness of supply networks in a developing country can produce threats or render resilience strategies either ineffective or even counterproductive. This study therefore finds that both CAS and embeddedness perspectives are needed jointly to explain SCRES – it is embeddedness in a developing country that contributes to the phenomenon of “supply chain risk migration”, whereby an attempt to mitigate one threat produces another threat and/or shifts the threat to another point in the supply network. This portrays resilience as a continual process of supply network members responding to chronic and catastrophic events that may be endogenous and/or exogenous, and to the outcomes of their own previous responses – not to a specific set of structures or practices. These findings have implications for managers wishing to build SCRES. For example, managers are informed that supply chain events of continuous possibilities deserve attention. Managers are also reminded of the potential migration of threats – they should thus understand how threats, strategies and potential outcomes are interconnected. Further, managers should understand the contexts in which their supply chains are embedded.

Information technology (IT) flexibility is an important aspect of today’s dynamic business environment. However, earlier research on this topic has not included the following: 1) a multidimensional structure that corresponds to diverse activities for supply chain management (SCM), 2) an informative explanation of how and by what means IT flexibility affects firm performance and 3) guidance to prioritise the flexibility dimensions to gain a competitive advantage. To fill these gaps, this study identified three dimensions of IT flexibility, namely transactional, operational and strategic flexibility, taking a systematic approach. Moreover, by combining dynamic capability (DC) and relational view (RV) theory, this study theorised a research model that links IT flexibility and firm performance. Process integration capability (PIC) was incorporated into the model as a mediator to provide a SCM research context. From the results of a partial least squares structured equation modelling (PLS SEM)analysis of 128 questionnaires from supply chain practitioners, this study validated the three IT flexibility dimensions and their hierarchical relationship. Moreover, it identified that transactional and operational flexibilities affect firm performance indirectly via PIC,while strategic flexibility directly affects firm performance. The model’s PLS SEM result was extended to an importance - performance analysis (IPA) matrix. By taking the importance and performance of each flexibility dimension as generic measurement criteria, this study prioritised the IT flexibility dimensions. Moreover, applying the same research model and methods to a specific focal firm offered a strategic way to allocate firm resources to the three IT flexibility dimensions. The theoretical contributions of this study are as follows: 1) the attainment of a multidimensional structure of IT flexibility, 2) identification of IT flexibility’s influencing mechanism on firm performance, 3) composition of DC and RV to provide a perspective on the explicit roles of IT flexibility and 4) a clear structure of the IT flexibility analysis framework within a context of SCM. Its practical contribution is the prioritisation IT flexibility dimensions, which will support firms in achieving the full potential of IT flexibility for SCM.

Outsourcing, where an organisation charges an external provider with the performance of an activity, has attracted growing interest in recent years as organisations have considered whether it is in their best interest to perform activities in-house or externally. Academic attention has also focused on the notion of supply chain management through effective Logistics management in organisations, as increased emphasis has been placed on the importance of seamiess supply chain processes for the achievement and sustenance of competitive advantage. Some academic theorists recommend that in order to achieve this, organisations should focus on their core, value-adding activities and outsource the non-core, non value-adding ones. In the UK, some petrol retailers have adopted Logistics outsourcing as a strategy through which supply chain solutions can be implemented within their petrol forecourt convenience retail operations. This research explores factors which influence these outsourcing decisions, the nature and supply chain impact of the outsourcing strategies and evaluates the supply chain role of Logistics service providers (3pls) and the implications of Logistics outsourcing in general for supply chain management and for the future of the 3pl industry. The study examines outsourcing from are source-based, transaction costs and supply chain perspective, highlighting the rationale behind organisations' decisions to outsource activities for which they lack in-house capability and which third parties can provide at lower costs. The study adopts an exploratory, theory building case-study approach in which data is gathered primarily through indepth interviews with informants from retailers and 3pls. Data analysis is carried out through a strategy of within- and cross-case evaluation of findings, highlighting key patterns and relationships in the data.

Indonesian textile and apparel supply networks are customer-driven. The majority of customers reside in developed nations and have sustainability embedded within their organisational goals. In contrast, the suppliers reside in developing nations such as Indonesia. Typically, each customer organization has its own code of conduct for suppliers that includes sustainability requirements. The codes of conduct are used by customers when selecting suppliers and in monitoring the delivery of contracts. As a result, small and medium-sized enterprises in Indonesia need to improve their ability to deliver sustainability goals in customers’ codes of conduct while also maintaining the efficiency and effectiveness of their operations. The aim of this research was to improve understanding of sustainable supply network operations in the Indonesian textile and apparel industry with a view to identifying ways in which small to medium-sized enterprises in low-middle income economies such as Indonesia might comply with emerging sustainability indicators. Data gathered from multi-national and small to medium-sized enterprises provided insights on current implementations of environmental and social sustainability practices in the Indonesian textile and apparel industry. This led to the design of a questionnaire that was used to elicit stakeholder perceptions of how sustainability requirements are addressed. This was supplemented with data collected through field site observations and semi-structured face-to-face interviews that captured real-life experiences of the phenomenon of sustainability. In parallel, data was gathered from industry stakeholders (including customers, regulators, and non-governmental organizations) on drivers for and challenges of adopting sustainability practices in accordance with customers’ codes of conduct. From the fieldwork, sustainability practices, while desirable, are perceived as having a detrimental impact on performance indicators such as time and cost. Supply network maps were used to visualise the flow of materials and information through case study networks. A key characteristic identified from the maps was the industrial cluster whose agents act as interfaces between Indonesian suppliers and their ultimate customers. Early results from a social network analysis indicate that these agents are dominant actors and agents of change in critical to the adoption of sustainability practices by Indonesian suppliers.

The unpredictable nature of extreme weather-induced disruptions is posing tremendous pressure on nowadays supply chains. Longer transports, increased fuel consumption, hazardous wastes, unsatisfied clients, social unrest and risks, damage to the environment, infrastructure and assets are only few of the pressuring outcomes. This situation becomes even more critical when it comes to freight transportation which is much closer to societies and to the environment. In order to counteract this, the concept of supply chain resilience is being adopted towards identifying solutions for the supply chains to recover after such a disruption took place. However, institutions tend to leverage (more) cost minimization as the key indicator of resilience efficiency against environmental and social indicators – and this is highly visible especially in the lower income region of South East Europe (SEE). This leverage is slowly becoming obsolete, as the global literature, policy and practice are consistently demanding for the need of resilient and green supply chain management (RGSCM) and implicitly of resilient and green freight transportation (RGFT). This is why, institutions can no longer emphasize economic benefits against societal and environmental value when dealing with resilience and thus, the proper implementation of RGFT/RGSCM strategies becomes critical. RGSCM and RGFT implementation have often been studied through various theoretical frameworks such as the ecological modernisation theory (EMT) for understanding how eco-innovations emerge, diffusion of innovation theory (DIT) for investigating how eco-innovations diffuse, complex and adaptive systems theory (CAST) for examining how resilience and self-adaptation is being achieved and finally, institutional and stakeholders theory (INT and ST) for reasoning how institutions adopt eco-innovations triggered by stakeholder groups (co-evolution). However, the key literature gap that this research aims to fill resides in the lack of existence of a converged framework for all the five theories with focus on understanding how institutional level RGFT/RGSCM practices can be implemented and leveraged at the stakeholder (mesosystem) level in order to ensure a wider scale impact. Such theoretical convergence gap becomes tangent with the recently developed quintuple helix model where eco-innovations, institutions, society and the environment are being seen as the key connected pillars of eco-modernisation in nowadays society. In this context, the aim of this thesis is to propose a quintuple helix framework for the implementation of RGFT/RGSCM during weather induced disruptions in SEE by underpinning how institutional interactions and RGFT/RGSCM eco-innovation implementation can scale-up to stakeholder level. In order to support this convergence and the theoretical framework assumptions, a three-stage mixed-method approach has been adopted at the South East European level (Stage one – qualitative interviews, N=6; Stage two – qualitative and quantitative semi-structured exploratory & confirmatory survey, N=311; Stage three – focus groups only on Greece in order to enable higher specialization of the findings, N=3 and modelling and simulation, N=3). Overall, the key outcome that has been revealed is that quintuple helix co-creation, goal and key performance indicators (KPI) alignment of all stakeholders and capacity to transform (eco-modernize) of institutions are the key enablers of fast eco-innovation (RGFT/RGSCM) diffusion and implementation. The additional (key) research outcomes are: firstly, disruptive eco-innovators are limited and most of the other institutions are primarily adapting/transforming; secondly, there is high willingness to leverage eco-innovations at the stakeholder level; thirdly, the RGFT/RGSCM eco-innovations will be based on the smart specialization areas of the country/region; fourthly, by having the inner desire to excel, institutions will continue to eco-innovate (mostly through steady transformation) – ensuring thus the sustainable change at the stakeholder level (by putting pressure on the late adopters). Lastly, a concerning element in this area resides in the existence of very isolated stakeholder groups which may not co-evolve. This research brings academic contribution by exploring each of the five theories and by proposing their convergence built upon the quintuple helix model. Additionally, this research provides advancements in the utilisation of mixed-methods research in RGFT/RGSCM. Similarly, this research provides practical benefits to institutions in terms of offering guidance and solutions for RGFT/RGSCM implementation. Policy-wise, this research enables better policy formulation especially in terms of triggering quintuple helix co-creation towards enhanced societal and environmental outcomes (impacting thus on society as well). Finally, the core limitations of this thesis which should be addressed in future studies consist of the high level approach in terms of converging the five theories as well as in the manner in which the triangulation is being performed (the three stages are not performed integrally and then triangulated – being rather integrated as means of one stage informing another).

A supply contract, which achieves the optimal performance for the buyer or the supply chain as a whole, does not necessarily maximize the supplier’s expected profit. Therefore, it is important to understand the impacts of supply contracts and their differences from a supplier’s perspective, which is the aim of this thesis. This thesis considers six types of supply contracts, namely, Returns Policy, Quantity Discount, Channel Rebate, Backup Agreement, Quantity Flexibility, and Quantity Commitment, in a supply chain of seasonal goods with a single selling season with a retailer and a supplier. Each contract is modelled in the framework of the interaction between the retailer’s and the supplier’s decisions. The contract parameters are optimized to maximise the supplier’s expected profit with consideration of retailer’s acceptance. Furthermore, the impacts of the demand pattern and cost structure on the performance of each contract are investigated. These contracts are then compared with each other and the best contracts are identified for various situations. In order to facilitate the supply contract selection in practice, a rule-based decision support system has been developed using Visual Basic, for user interfaces and MATLAB for the optimization engine. The rule base embodies the outcome of the comparison of supply contracts, and therefore is able to direct the system to select the best supply contract for a particular situation.

The Nigeria's highway infrastructure are currently being procured and maintained using the traditional Design, Bid Build (DBB) method. The procurement method and funding mechanism appeared not to have produced the desired result of timely and cost effective project outcome nor good quality and sustainable road network. This study set out to investigate the challenges being experienced in this traditional procurement method. The study also explored the features of Public Private Partnership (PPP) and its potentials as an alternative procurement method for highway development, operation and maintenance, including developing and validating PPP framework for application in highways in Nigeria. The study formulated two research questions - to investigate why the traditional method has not produced the desired result; and how the PPP method can play a role in achieving the desired highway project output. The research conducted literature review to examine the challenges of DBB method in Nigeria, and subsequently explored the concepts of PPP generally and its particular application in highways. The research philosophy is majorly interpretive with minor positivists blend in a methodological pluralism for methodology enhancement. The research used case study research design where quantitative method was first used to investigate the current highway projects performance in cost and time perspective under the DBB method. The research also used qualitative method to analyse official documents and questionnaires to conduct an in-depth analysis of the highway Performance Indicators and their Critical Success Factors under DBB and PPP methods. The comparative analysis of the research findings showed that the DBB method used for highway development in Nigeria generally results in cost and time overruns, low quality road network occasioned by the lack of adequate public financing, poor road maintenance management system, suboptimal risk sharing and lack of innovative processes, and inefficient procurement process. The findings also showed that PPP by way of its financial models, efficient procurement, operation and maintenance processes, technical and managerial capacities, as well as the bundling of design, construction and maintenance in a single contract package may produce timely, cost effective, good quality and sustainable highway network in Nigeria. The concomitant road sustainability will result in economic benefits of reduction in vehicle operating and maintenance costs, improved standard of road and longevity that support other economic activities. The resultant social sustainability benefits include reduction in accident rate, reduced travel hours, improvement in health and safety of road users. Environmental benefits of road sustainability include protection and enhancement of natural environment by reducing pollutants being generated from dilapidated roads. The findings were subjected to testing for validity, reliability and generalisability. The findings from data analysis were further processed to develop PPP framework for highways in the Nigeria. The framework was validated and the result of the validation showed that the framework is appropriate and applicable in the Nigeria environment. The framework developed in the research is a unique contribution to knowledge. It provides a holistic view, in a single pictorial display of interconnecting web relationships, the performances of both the DBB and PPP procurement methods, the possible enhancement of DBB method and the implementation procedure of PPP method for a sustainable highway infrastructure in Nigeria. The framework will be of benefits to policy makers and regulators such as PPP Unit of the Federal Ministry of Works as the operators of Nigeria's highways and the Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission, the regulators of PPP scheme in the areas of decision making on alternative procurement options for highway projects, as well as adequate PPP governance. Other actors that will benefit from the study are the external consultants and contract managers being engaged by FMW. Academic community and trainers will also benefit from the research, particularly as regards to the peculiarity of implementing PPP for sustainable highways in Nigeria. Accessibility to the research work will be made possible through publications in both local and international journals, and also presenting technical papers in workshops and conferences.

Inventory management has become a favorite topic in the literature. However, research focusing on inventory performance and management in China is quite limited. A good understanding of inventory control would provide valuable information about the mechanism through which a firm determines its target inventory level and adjusts the inventory volume. Moreover, this study also contributes to examine inventory management improvement and its implement in developing country. This research uses a large sample of firm-level panel data from China to study inventory management and performance from three aspects. First, using a variant of error-correction model, we empirically study the adjustment pattern of inventory and the effects of certain determinants on firms’ target inventory level with emphasis on industry heterogeneity over the period 2000-2009. We find strong evidence indicating a partial adjustment mechanism in short-run and the speeds of adjustment are various among different industries. From a long-run perspective, sales, ownership structure, political affiliation and managerial fixed cost are detected to be significant indicators of target inventory level. Second, we employ an asymmetric error-correction model to study the adjustment mechanism of inventory in different macro business regimes. We find that an asymmetric adjustment mechanism could be commonly claimed in short-run: firms tend to be more sensitive when they confront negative demand shocks. However, the indicators of target inventory level work symmetrically regardless of external business environment. Last, we test whether there is a link between innovation and inventory reduction. We find that total factor productivity (TFP) is a better indicator of innovation, and higher TFP contributes to a lower inventory volume. Moreover, when allowing the asymmetric adjustment mechanism, the impact of TPF is symmetric between the upswing and downswing of business cycle, which means the benefits of innovations are lasting and cannot be discharged by adverse economic environments.