Research Purpose: Customer focus has become increasing critical in order for organisations to effectively compete. Organisations operate in continuously changing environments, with dynamic customer needs requiring that organisations frequently revisit their strategic objectives. Supply chain integration provides organisations with an opportunity to keep up with these changing environments, offering a platform for collaboration with external partners. This research explores three of the customer-focused supply chain capabilities and their relationship with organisation’s operational efficiency and overall performance Research Methodology: A quantitative and descriptive correlational research approach was conducted, with a self-administered online survey questionnaire sent to selected employees of FMCG organisations. A basis of the research was formed through a literature review focused on supply chain integration, in particular on the three forward-integration capabilities of customer-closeness, use of integrative technologies, and information and knowledge sharing. The research carried out descriptive analysis and correlational testing between the forward-integrated supply chain capabilities, and operational efficiency and overall organisational performance effects. Research Findings: analysis carried out suggests that the three forward-integration capabilities contribute positively to process improvement of supply chain integration efficiency and organisational performance. Organisations should increase focus on their relationship with customers, embrace the use of technology and employ information as a strategic resource. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / lmgibs2014 / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / MBA / Unrestricted

The objective of this research is to determine if the generally accepted supply chain competency frameworks are in fact applicable to dynamic markets. Many studies into supply chain competencies have been conducted but these have largely focussed on developed markets. With the onset of globalisation and emerging economies competing for a bigger piece of the global economy, supply chain skills have become even more critical as supply chains, rather than organisations, compete. A survey was done amongst supply chain practitioners in both dynamic and developed markets. The survey was issued to test the extent to which the widely accepted supply chain competencies are important to supply chain practitioners in dynamic markets. After confirming the reliability of the results, it was found that respondents in dynamic markets accepted that the competencies as articulated in supply chain competency frameworks were in fact applicable and relevant to supply chain practitioners in dynamic markets. The study also found that while there is strong dynamic market alignment with the competencies, supply chain practitioners differed with their developed world counterparts about the importance of some of the individual competencies. Even though this research has some limitations due to a relatively small sample that is essentially localised to the mining industry, its implications for supply chain practitioners should not be ignored. Also, there is a possibility that the APICS competency model may not have accurately reflected the competency requirements that are characteristic of the supply chain practitioners in dynamic markets. This study can be used as a basis for future research; for example: the perceptions of supply chain practitioners across multiple industries and organisations can be compared. Also, a mix of qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis could be used to gain an in-depth understanding of the requisite supply chain skills and competencies / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / pagibs2014 / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / MBA / Unrestricted

The main research problem addressed in this study was to determine the key factors required by purchasing and supply departments in the automotive manufacturing industry to be efficient and effective. To achieve this objective, it was necessary to identify five sub-objectives which were, firstly, to determine the extent to which the purchasing and supply departments in the automotive industry believe that certain key factors in pricing, quality and supplier management are required to achieve excellence. Secondly, to identify if the purchasing and supply departments in the automotive industry actually implement the key factors on pricing, quality and supplier management in practice. Thirdly, to determine if there are any additional factors other than these key factors that business firms regard as key factors to be classified as worldclass purchasing and supply departments. Fourthly, to analyse why purchasing and supply departments in the automotive manufacturing industry do not always implement these key factors. Lastly, to identify any other factors that could have a significant negative impact on the performance of purchasing and supply departments. The study commenced with an analysis and review of relevant literature from various text books, journals, publications and internet sources. The literature study covered issues such as price determination, cost management, basic negotiation strategies, managing supplier quality and the supplier base, as well as a general overview of the latest developments in purchasing and supply management in business. The purpose of the literature analysis was to establish a theoretical basis for the design of the questionnaire which was used as a research instrument in this study. A survey was conducted among selected automotive assemblers and their first and second tier manufacturing suppliers in the automotive industry. The main areas of focus in the questionnaire were pricing, quality, and supplier management. As the questions in the questionnaire related to the purchasing and supply department of a business firm, a qualified and experienced buyer in the purchasing and supply department was identified in each firm to complete the questionnaire. The empirical results from the study conducted indicated that the respondents were in strong agreement with the proposed importance of the factors of pricing, quality, and supplier management required to achieve xcellence. However, the respondents also indicated that there were various obstacles which prevented the firms from implementing these key factors. Some of the obstacles mentioned were long lead times, late deliveries from suppliers, too few competitors in the market place, supplier capacity constraints and the sustainability of suppliers. Additional obstacles that the study identified were the high workload of buyers in general, incompetent staff and insufficient manpower that affected the performance of a purchasing and supply department. The buyers were not only performing buying activities, but were also involved in logistics related activities, which increased their workload and negatively affected their performance. Lack of specialised purchasing and supply chain knowledge was identified as another obstacle to achieving excellence. The empirical study highlighted some recommendations to assist purchasing and supply departments in the automotive industry to achieve excellence and become world-class departments. Examples of these recommendations are that suppliers need to be educated on how to understand their costing models and to check their own sustainability; local purchasing and supply departments require training in the purchasing skills such as incoterms, delivery times, minimum and maximum order quantity; as well as the payment terms. Buyers should be trained to become experts in their products and packaging, as well as the manufacturing process of the product they are purchasing The business firm should only employ qualified buyers who have financial and administrative skills, as well as the ability to adapt to change and work in teams. Buyers also need to master the in-house systems and work procedures involved in purchasing a product. The empirical study also identified that the majority of buyers in the automotive manufacturing industry are senior buyers, male in gender and between the ages of 40-49. The implementation of the recommendations based on the study’s empirical findings will assist in improved pricing, quality and supply management in the automotive manufacturing industry.

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Effective supply chain management gains much attention from industry and academia because it helps firms across a supply chain to reduce cost and improve customer service level efficiently. Focusing on one of the key challenges of the supply chains, namely, demand uncertainty, this dissertation extends the work of Zhao, Xie, and Leung so as to examine the effects of forecasting method selection coupled with information sharing on supply chain performance in a dynamic business environment. The results of this study showed that under various scenarios, advanced forecasting methods such as neural network and GARCH models play a more significant role when capacity tightness increases and is more important to the retailers than to the supplier under certain circumstances in terms of supply chain costs. Thus, advanced forecasting models should be promoted in supply chain management. However, this study also demonstrated that forecasting methods not capable of modeling features of certain demand patterns significantly impact a supply chain's performance. That is, a forecasting method misspecified for characteristics of the demand pattern usually results in higher supply chain costs. Thus, in practice, supply chain managers should be cognizant of the cost impact of selecting commonly used traditional forecasting methods, such as moving average and exponential smoothing, in conjunction with various operational and environmental factors, to keep supply chain cost under control. This study demonstrated that when capacity tightness is high for the supplier, information sharing plays a more important role in effective supply chain management. In addition, this study also showed that retailers benefit directly from information sharing when advanced forecasting methods are employed under certain conditions.

The purpose of this thesis was to investigate how potentials of Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) in relation to Just In Time (JIT) management could be utilized within logistics management. For this, a framework, based on previous research of the interrelations of RTLS and JIT management, is proposed, to assess the effects of RTLS on logistics management, both on a managerial - as well as on an operational level. To answer the proposed research questions, the study followed a deductive and exploratory case study design, which was conducted at a company within the automotive industry. To understand the challenges within logistics management at the case company, interviews, observations, analysis of internal documents and a focus group were used, which allowed for a triangulation of the captured information. The findings and analysis of the data show that on an operational level the challenges within logistics management are related to complex logistic structures, pull strategies with partial push material flows, lack of information and – reliable data, as well as processes reliant on individuals. On the managerial level the findings suggest challenges related to high complexity and space constraints, time constraints, lack of transparency and – data connections, the company's improvement focus, employee attitude and a lack of reliable data. When the challenges were evaluated in relation to the proposed framework, it shows that these challenges would be resolved or counteracted by the benefits RTLS could provide in relation to JIT management. This study thereby supports the positive correlation between RTLS’s potential and JIT in logistics management.

This research explores the impact of interactive communication on business-to business (B2B) relationships. In the past decade the internet and especially social media as a mode of communication has grown rapidly in both consumer and business markets. Drawing on marketing channels and communications literature this paper identifies the dimensions of interactive communication and develops a theoretical framework to examine their impact on satisfaction, commitment, and advocacy. Media synchronicity theory and the concept of the internet as an alternative to the real world are used to distinguish between digital and non-digital modes of communication. Relationship marketing is used to identify the dimensions of interactivity: rationality, social interaction, contact density, and reciprocal feedback. The framework developed is usedto explore the influence of face-to-face (F2F), digital, and traditional, impersonalcommunications on the dimensions of interactivity.Hypotheses linking the mode of communication: personal, digital, and impersonal with the dimensions of interactivity and relational outcomes are empirically examined with data from the commercial printing and graphic design industry. Confirmatory Factor Analysis is used to analyze the measurement and structural model. Personal, F2F communication has the greatest impact on social interaction, reciprocal feedback, and number of contacts. Digital communication has a weaker effect on these dimensions and impersonal communication has the weakest effect. Personal and Digital have equal impacts on rationality and rationality is the only dimension of interactivity positively associated with relationship satisfaction. Contact density has a negative impact on relationship satisfaction and this negative impact is greater with personal communication that it is with digital. The study shows that affective commitment leads to advocacy in a B2B channel, but trust and calculative commitment have no impact on advocacy. The findings of the study have implications for both managers and researchers regarding the mode and content of communications in B2B relationships. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2013.

In this dissertation, we aim to investigate some delivery planning problems under different aspects of uncertain conditions in order to present some insights on how to develop more efficient and effective logistics solutions in the challenging, dynamic and competitive industry of express delivery nowadays. / Lastly, we introduce a travel time estimation method which can be considered as an upstream extension on the first delivery planning problem or any routing problems that require travel time in a road network as an input parameter. We realize that different trips may traverse on some links that are transited by other trips as well; and therefore linear and quadratic programming models can be developed to infer the travel time of any road segments which are traversed by more than one trip from the consideration of the common road segments of various trips. Bus routes information is proposed as the data source because of their coverage on the road network and their data available. Robustness of the proposed models is evaluated according to the deviation between the resultant inferences and the means of the segment travel times. It is found that the basic models suffer from a fundamental problem of underspecification issue if the number of observed trips (i.e. constraints) is fewer than the number of road segments (i.e. variables) to be estimated. Therefore, two additional types of constraints are introduced to address these issues. / The focus of the second delivery planning problem addressed in this dissertation is switched to the randomness of the demands at the delivery locations. We consider a single-depot problem in which a large volume of packages have to be delivered in a dense and small area with a lot of high-rise buildings within an extremely tight delivery commitment time window. At each vertex, the package volume (i.e. demand) is a highly stochastic variable and its service time is also dependent on the demand. This version of problem is typically faced by express service providers which offer premium express services to customers that are protected by the money back guarantee (MBG) condition. We name this version of problem as a time-constrained vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands and service times (SVRP-D). Since both the demand and service time of a vertex are stochastic, the vehicle capacity and the commitment-time (i.e. deadline) constraints may not be satisfied after the demands are realized, and recourse action is thus necessary to "rescue" the "infeasible" delivery plan through additional effort and cost. Three typical recourse actions are independently considered: (1) restocking; (2) outsourcing; and (3) reassignment. A two-stage stochastic integer programming is proposed such that the first-stage problem is to determine a set of a priori routes which minimize the vehicle travel cost and the cost for any known recourse actions. Dependent on a first-stage solution, the second-stage problem is to decide the optimal recourse plan with least cost according to the pre-determined recourse action. / Two delivery planning problems and one travel time estimation model under various aspects of randomness are addressed in this dissertation. The first delivery planning problem considers an extension on a well-known problem---the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW), where the travel time required between each delivery location is a stochastic variable, instead of a fixed value. We name this version of the VRPTW as a vehicle routing problem with time windows and stochastic travel times (VRPTWST). A two-stage stochastic integer programming with recourse model is developed and its objective is to minimize the vehicle travel cost together with the expected loss due to the violation of the delivery time windows. An exact branch-and-cut (B&C) algorithm is proposed. This algorithm is effective for small-size problems, e.g. instances with only 8 vertices. For larger-size problems, some modifications on the B&C algorithm are suggested to improve the solution time with only a small deviation from optimality. / Wong Chi Fat. / "May 2007." / Adviser: Janny Leung. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-01, Section: B, page: 0596. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 256-270). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

As information revision is becoming a more and more common practice in industry, we put our emphasis on the context of information revision and decision making in a supply chain. This dissertation is concerned with the analysis of information updating, competitive study of a two-level supply chain, and volume flexible contract together with spot market purchase. / For the competitive study, we focus on the dynamics of competitive behaviors between the supplier and the buyer. For the demand and demand forecast with single-peak probability distribution functions, we prove the existence of a unique Stackelberg equilibrium from the Stackelberg game at each stage. / For the contract study, we develop a model which takes both volume flexible contract and spot market purchase into consideration. The optimal order quantity at each stage is determined. Furthermore, by making use of the stochastic comparison theory, we investigate the impact on profit and the optimal order quantity induced by the accuracy of the demand forecast. (Abstract shortened by UMI.) / With the framework of information revision, the decision dynamics is the focus of supply chain management. We primarily concentrate on the competitive and cooperative study of a simple two-level supply chain. / With the phenomenon observed from local industry, our research, on the analysis of information updating within a node in a supply chain, involves three tasks: (a) analyzing the data collected from local industry; (b) modeling demand forecasting process based on the observation; and (c) determining the operational factors which drive the fluctuation of demand forecast variances. With regard to (a), we observe that, as the forecasting horizon decreases, the variances of forecasts increase and variances of forecasting errors decrease. With regard to (b), we make use of Bayesian analysis approach to model the demand forecasting process, and prove that, under multi-stage demand forecasting structure, both the variance and the precision of demand forecast increase. Concerning (c), four operational factors, i.e. price promotion, lotsizing, new product introduction, and pre-confirmed order, are considered to be the causes. / Hua Xiang. / "November 2001." / Adviser: Houmin Yan. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 63-01, Section: B, page: 0506. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 104-111). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest dissertations and theses, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

El propósito de este estudio fue determinar la influencia de la gestión logística en el valor ganado en los proyectos de edificación en la selva peruana de una empresa constructora de Lima Metropolitana. En la metodología, se ha empleado la investigación científica cualitativa, la misma que ha servido para el desarrollo de los aspectos más importantes del presente trabajo, desde el planteamiento del estudio hasta la contrastación de la hipótesis. The purpose of this study was to determine the influence of logistics management on the value earned in building projects in the Peruvian jungle of a construction company in Metropolitan Lima. In the methodology, qualitative scientific research has been used, which has served for the development of the most important aspects of this work, from the approach of the study to the testing of the hypothesis.