<p>With the extensive use of outsourcing and more frequent technological innovations, global supply chains become vastly stretched and dynamic networks. As a result, firms face increasingly significant challenges to managing their fragile supply networks and responding to more rapidly changing demand evolutions. In this dissertation, we analyze three aspects of these challenges and summarize the findings in three essays. The first essay considers firms' problem of managing social and environmental non-compliance risk at its sub-tier suppliers. We figure out under what circumstances the firms should delegate the sub-tier supplier non-compliance management to its direct suppliers and under what directly control. In the second essay, we analyze the firm's strategy to deal with random demand surges. We develop a new demand model that captures important non-Markov characteristics of possible random demand surge trajectories and derive the optimal safety stock and reactive capacity strategy. Eventually, we establish a useful framework for supply chain planning under a variety of surge demand characteristics (e.g., frequency, intensity, duration, and shape). In the third essay, we examine a dynamic customer-base management problem for a firm with finite capacity, when its customers are prone to disruption and retention risks. We show that the optimal base size is an adding-up-to policy and derive the firm's optimal capacity allocation policy when capacity shortage occurs. In summary, our studies in this dissertation provide useful modeling ideas, decision tools, insights, and guidance for firms to build up resilient supply chains from both the supply and demand sides.</p> / Dissertation

We study the optimal resource portfolio for a price-setter firm under a consumer choice model with supply and demand risks. The firm sells two products that are vertically differentiated, and has the option to invest in both dedicated and flexible resources. Our objective is to understand the effectiveness of the two hedging mechanisms, resource flexibility and demand management through production differentiation, under demand and supply risks. We show that the presence of consumer-driven substitution does not always reduce the need for the firm to offer differentiated products. In particular, when the firm faces demand risk and differential production costs, it might invest in the flexible resource and offer differentiated products for a wider range of parameters. Interestingly, more uncertainty (in the form of additional supply risk) does not always make the firm more eager to adopt a hedging mechanism. This depends on the relationship between resource risks, product attributes, and resource investment costs. On the other hand, when the firm invests in the flexible resource, this never completely replaces the dedicated resources, and always results in a "diverse" resource portfolio. While this happens in the supply risk setting mainly due to resource diversification advantage, it also happens in the demand risk setting due to the vertical differentiation between the products. Finally, in the absence of differential production costs, demand management by itself (without resource flexibility) becomes powerful enough to hedge against the demand risk, but not the supply risk, due to the additional resource diversification benefit of the flexible resource in the latter setting. / Ph. D.

En todos los giros de negocio existen riesgos, la importancia de su identificación oportuna en cada una de las áreas de la empresa se ha vuelto más relevante en los últimos años, puesto que son considerados dentro de la toma de decisiones por las consecuencias que emanan de ellos, las cuales tienen incidencia directa en la rentabilidad del negocio. La presente investigación tiene un enfoque cualitativo, de tipo explicativo. Considera como propósito explorar la literatura existente sobre la gestión de riesgos en la administración de la cadena de suministro operada bajo el efecto push, para luego contrastar las posturas de diversos autores, a fin de proponer nuevas líneas de investigación. Los hallazgos más relevantes encontrados en este estudio son los procesos en los cuales se puede desarrollar una estrategia push. Se observó que esta es aplicable en la producción, canal de distribución e inventarios y que genera riesgos que afectan de distinta manera a los actores involucrados en la cadena de suministro. Por otro lado, se halla que como medida para lograr una equidad en el riesgo que asume cada actor de la cadena de suministro es posible consensuar una estrategia híbrida. Esta situación permite abordar una brecha de investigación que compruebe la eficiencia de la aplicación de una estrategia híbrida en los procesos de producción, canal de distribución e inventarios de la cadena de suministro que pueda llevar a una propuesta de estandarización. / In all business lines there are risks, and the importance of their timely identification in each of the areas of the company has become more relevant in recent years, since they are considered within the decision-making process, due to the consequences that emanate from them, which could be detrimental to efficient management that increases the profitability of the business. Qualitative research, explanatory. Its purpose is to explore the existing literature on risk management in the administration of the supply chain operated under the push effect, and then contrast the positions of various authors, in order to propose new lines of research. The most relevant findings found in this study are the processes in which a push strategy can be developed, it was observed that it is applicable in production, distribution channel and inventories, generating risks that affect in different ways the actors involved in the supply chain. On the other hand, it is found that as a measure of achieving equity in the risk assumed by each actor in the supply chain, it is possible to agree on a hybrid strategy. This situation allows addressing a research gap that verifies the efficiency of applying a hybrid strategy in the production processes, distribution channel and supply chain inventories, which may lead to a standardization proposal. / Trabajo de Suficiencia Profesional

Les Partenariats Publics Privés (PPPs) peuvent être un outil efficace pour optimiser et moderniser la commande publique dans un contexte où les besoins en investissement public ne cessent d’accroître. Les fréquences importantes de renégociation et les difficultés à estimer correctement les revenus futurs demeurent un défi majeur lors de la structuration financière des PPPs. Ce travail propose d’incorporer des clauses financières flexibles afin de remédier à ce problème. L’approche développée se base sur les théories d’options réelles et d’optimisation multi-objectif. Dans un premier temps, une méthodologie adéquate pour la gestion des risques est développée. La volatilité du projet est déterminée par le biais de la simulation de Monte Carlo et un déflateur stochastique est introduit afin de conduire les différentes valorisations d’options sous la probabilité historique. Ce travail développe dans un second temps, quatre formes de flexibilité qui permettent de réajuster l'équilibre financier du projet, si le revenu est insuffisant. Enfin une approche d’optimisation multi-objectif est développée afin de permettre de visualiser les différents compromis auxquels l’introduction de la flexibilité donne lieu. / Public private partnerships can be a solution to the dilemma of how to do more with less available funds that public entities are constantly financing in the last decades. If implemented properly, Public Private Partnerships can contribute to the modernization of public service provision and can constitute efficient vehicles for the delivery of optimal value for money. The high incidence of renegotiation as well as the difficulty of accurately predicting the future demand on the projects is a matter of concern when it comes to the financial structuring of Public Private Partnerships. This work proposes a real-option- based optimization framework to boost the financial viability of the projects. This is done by introducing flexible financial clauses. First, an adequate framework for risk management, where volatility is derived by Monte Carlo simulation and the valuation is made without switching to the risk neutral measure, is presented. Four families of flexible clauses are, afterwards, investigated. Such clauses are triggerred, if the revenue level of the projet is not sufficient to guarnatee its financiel viability. Finally, this work develops a multi-objective optimization approach in order to assess the different trade-offs that the introduction of flexibility leads to. The proposed optimization problem is solved via multi-objective evolutionary algorithms.