The Global Supply Chain Forum (Stanford Global Supply Chain Forum Web Resource, http://www.stanford.edu/groups/scforum) defines supply chain management (SCM) as “Supply chain management is the integration of key business processes from end user through original suppliers that provides products, services and information that add value for customer and other stakeholders.” The rapid development of the Internet has dramatically changed the traditional definitions of manufacturer, suppliers and customers. Newer approaches to supply chain management attempt to organize the supply chain as a network of cooperating intelligent agents, each performing one or more supply chain functions and each coordinating actions with one another. This research is aimed at creating a viable model of a single manufacturer single supplier collaborative supply chain system using a Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) system. The research further uses known inventory performance parameters to performance benchmark the VMI system with traditional push-pull systems, develop a collaborative forecasting spreadsheet solution and a best alternative ordering policy amongst EOQ, Monthly, JIT and VMI policies under known lead time and a variety of demand distribution functions. / Master of Science

Synsam started the Synsam Group's Production and Innovation Center (SPIC) on Frösön in the summer of 2022 as part of their sustainability work. The factory locating in Sweden contributes to shorter lead times, reduced carbon footprint, and more environmentally friendly transportation. Synsam has its own collections, called \textit{House Brands}, where some are produced at the newly established production facility in Sweden, while others are outsourced for production in Asia. The outsourced production has longer lead time compared to the SPIC-flow, larger minimum order quantities, and greater risks in transport delays. The aim of the project was to compare production at SPIC, with the purchasing process from Asia, the Asia-flow. This to investigate the challenges and opportunities posed by establishing in Sweden, particularly concerning costs, risk, and logistics. The focus was on how the two flows tie up capital in finished goods inventory and inventory for components and materials, as well as the size of inventory holding costs. With the aim as a starting point, the project's first phase was initiated: a preliminary study with a literature review and informal interviews. Subsequently, the second and third phases involved data collection and processing. The fourth phase involved modeling, where optimization of the procurement and production processes was carried out entailed on selected parameters. Lastly, the fifth phase involved scenario analysis. Throughout all phases, verification and validation have been conducted. The project's conclusion shows that product groupings where the products are expensive or have low demand tie up less capital in the SPIC-flow compared to the Asia-flow. This is mainly because SPIC can produce smaller batches, thereby reducing the number of products in inventory since production can be more precisely aligned with demand. Another conclusion from the project is that in the event of a sudden decreased demand, the SPIC-flow has fewer products that need to be recycled compared to the Asia-flow, resulting in less capital tied up. The work concludes by presenting recommendations and suggestions for further work.

The problem is to determine the status of the methods of inventory valuation in Texas Cotton Mills. This study is also conducted to determine how much uniformity, if any, exists in this particular industry.

Yes / Despite the surge of literature on customer engagement (CE) in social media, few studies shed light on how to leverage CE to improve firms’ operational efficiency. This research proposes a fresh framework using social media data to improve demand forecasting accuracy, resulting in a cost-efficient inventory control strategy. Drawing upon the resource mobilization perspective in particular, this research quantifies the construct of CE from the view of input–output efficiency evaluation using the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model, and then leverages CE to forecast consumer online demand and reconfigure inventory management strategy. Using a 71-week data set from a social commerce start-up in China, this research shows that this new framework dramatically increases demand forecasting accuracy and reduces operational costs in inventory management. This study contributes to the literature by demonstrating the value of social media data in improving operational efficiency, particularly regarding inventory management. / National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project No. 71671152)

Two important areas of decision-making in distribution system design involve facility location and inventory policy determination. Facility location analyzes questions such as how many facilities should be opened, where they should be located, and which customers should be assigned to which DCs. Inventory policy determination involves more tactical decisions such as the order quantities and frequencies at each level or echelon in the network. It is believed that these two decisions can influence each other significantly. Including a multi-echelon inventory policy decision in a location analysis allows a user to capitalize on the strengths that each DC has to offer (e.g., lower labor rates, land costs, etc.). Likewise, when the locations of two facilities are known, a multi-echelon inventory policy can be designed better to incorporate the exact lead times and fixed costs between the facilities at each level of the system. Despite this, the two problems are typically solved independently. This research addresses these problems together and investigates different heuristic methods for solving a combined inventory-location model. We begin by presenting the background and formulation for each problem. These formulations are then combined to show how the two problems can be mathematically formulated together. Rather than solve the problem exactly, two heuristic methods using different philosophies are tested. We apply these heuristic methods to the combined inventory-location problem to determine how much we can improve distribution network design solutions and what type of heuristic methodology is most effective in gaining these improvements. Our results show that the combined inventory-location model is capable of improving on the solutions obtained by a location model with a fixed inventory policy. The improvement based on the data sets tested in this research was approximately $60,000. However, in cases where the inventory costs are a larger portion of the total cost, the improvement made by the inventory-location model increased to over $1,000,000. We also found that our second heuristic method tested provided statistically significant improved results over our first heuristic method. Moreover, the second heuristic method typically ran 67% faster. The improved results, although small in a relative sense (the average improvement was 0.18%), would still represent a large absolute improvement in supply chain costs. As much as $174,000 was saved in the data sets tested for this research. / Master of Science

No description available.

Currently many American industrial firms are considering the adoption of Just-In-Time (JIT) as an inventory control/material flow system. A JIT system can have several configurations. Examples exist of JIT being applied system-wide between all the echelons which make up a channel. There are also examples of firms adopting JIT only on the materials management side, or alternatively, only on the physical distribution side of a particular focal organization (echelon) within a channel. The reality of uncertainty in the channel's operation and environment suggests that alternative inventory systems (such as JIT) must be evaluated under a range of internal operational uncertainty and external demand uncertainty conditions. This study offers a rational methodology to anticipate the performance impact of alternative system designs under realistic operating conditions. The G.P.M. simulation model was used to represent the operation of a channel under sixteen treatment conditions. The research design was full factorial with two levels each of four factors (physical distribution JIT, materials management JIT, materials management operational uncertainty, and demand uncertainty). The response variables which were used as indicators of channel performance included: profitability, order cycle time, standard deviation of order cycle time, and percent customer orders filled. Eleven research hypotheses explored the relationship between JIT configuration and uncertainty, both in terms of profitability and physical distribution service level maintained. The major conclusions of the research are: 1. JIT is not the unidimensional system often depicted in descriptive studies. JIT effects tend to be complex, interactive, and level dependent. It is particularly difficult to predict the effect of JIT on one echelon, or on subsystems within echelons. 2. Rather than the inherent positive effects often attributed to JIT, results indicate negative effects for both profit and service under a range of uncertainty conditions. 3. Results support the common criticism of JIT that its performance is sensitive to uncertainty, particularly demand uncertainty. The performance of non-JIT systems were also shown to have similar sensitivity to uncertainty. 4. Most synergistic interactions between factors were not significant, but the statistical procedure for means comparison was acknowledged to be conservative. 5. Results also indicated that JIT systems may make the job of maintaining high customer service levels more difficult. / Ph. D.

Background: Concerns about burnout, and its consequences, among German physicians are rising. However, data on burnout among German physicians are scarce. Also, a suspected association between burnout and German physicians’ wishes to leave remains to be studied. Therefore, the extent of burnout, and the association between burnout and wishes to leave clinical practice or to go abroad for clinical work was studied in a sample of young physicians in Saxony. Methods: In a cross-sectional survey, all physicians ≤40 years and registered with the State Chamber of Physicians of Saxony, Germany (n = 5956) received a paper-pencil questionnaire inquiring about socio-demographics, job satisfaction, and wishes to leave clinical practice or to go abroad for clinical work. Response rate was 40 % (n = 2357). Burnout was measured with the German version of the Maslach Burnout Inventory - Human Services Survey (MBI) consisting of the subscales emotional exhaustion (feeling emotionally drained), depersonalization (feelings of cynicsm) and personal accomplishment (feelings of personal achievement in job). Variables associated with burnout, and the association between burnout and wishes to leave were assessed in multivariate logistic regression analyses. Results: For emotional exhaustion participants reached a mean of 21.3 [standard deviation = 9.74], for depersonalization a mean of 9.9 [5.92], and for personal accomplishment a mean of 36.3 [6.77]. Men exhibited significantly higher depersonalization than women (11.3 [6.11] versus 9 [5.62], p < 0.001). Eleven percent of participants showed a high degree of burnout on all subscales, while 35 % did not show a high degree of burnout on any subscale. Confirming that one would become a physician again, and higher satisfaction with the components \"work environment\" and \"humaneness\", were associated with a lower chance for a high degree of burnout on all subscales. Higher emotional exhaustion and lower personal accomplishment were associated with an increased chance of wishing to leave clinical practice. Higher emotional exhaustion and higher depersonalization were associated with an increased chance of wishing to go abroad for clinical work. Conclusions: Preventing physician burnout may not only benefit the affected individual. It may also benefit the health care system by potentially preventing physicians from leaving clinical practice or from going abroad for clinical work.

This thesis is focused on a simulation modelling approach to address the inventory inaccuracy problems in a warehouse operation. The main motivation which led to this research was a desire to investigate the inventory inaccuracy issues that have been highlighted by a logistics company. Previous and current research into inventory inaccuracy issues is largely related to the development of RFID technology as a possible solution to inventory problems. Since the inventory inaccuracy related to RFID technology is focused on the overall measurement of inventory management and retail business, there are differences between this existing research and the research presented in this thesis which is focused on issues of inventory inaccuracy in a warehouse operation. In this thesis, warehouse operation is studied as a detailed sequence of processes that are involved in the flow of items physically in parallel with related information being stored in the computer system. In these processes there are many places where errors can occur in counting or recording details of inventory, or in physically moving, storing or picking items incorrectly. These details of a warehouse operation are used to develop a conceptual model of inventory inaccuracy in warehouse operations. The study also found that typically a product needs to be considered differently at different stages of its progress through a warehouse (and therefore within different sections of the conceptual model). This is because initially batches of a product are likely to be delivered from a supplier, therefore if errors occur soon after the product is delivered to the warehouse, the error might involve the whole batch (for example the batch may be misplaced and put in an incorrect storage location), or the error might involve just part of the batch (for example poor transportation by forklift truck may damage the packaging carton and some of the items within the carton). When the product is stored ready for meeting customer orders, it needs to be considered as individual items (and errors can occur in counting of individual items or individual items may be misplaced or stolen). Finally, when a customer order is received, the product will be picked and grouped to meet the requirements of the order (for example, one order may require 10 of the product whilst another order may require 20 of the product). Errors might again occur to the whole group or to just part of the group. (Continued ...)

This study identifies the concepts of reliability, cost of downtime, cost of spare parts, and procurement lead time as the four key moderators of spare parts availability. These concepts are used to establish a model to manage spare parts inventories. Reliability was assessed in terms of developing failure predictions for major component categories. Cost of downtime was evaluated by identifying various methods for determining costs associated with downtime. Cost of spare parts was examined to find correlations with economic indicators. These correlations were used to predict future price movements. Yearly changes in lead time were identified and correlated with economic indexes to develop movement predictability.