Series: Schriftenreihe des Instituts für Transportwirtschaft und Logistik - Logistik

Inventory management and pricing decisions based on quantitative models both in industrial practice and academic works often rely on minimizing expected cost or maximizing expected revenues or profits, which refers to the concept of risk-neutrality of the decision maker. Although many useful insights in operational problems can be obtained by such an approach, it is well understood that incorporating attitudes toward risk is an important lever for building new theories in other fields such as economics and finance. The level of risk associated with an investment might be as important as the expected gain from the investment. Hence, it is necessary to find appropriate measures of risk and the appropriate objectives related to or including these risk measures for inventory control & pricing problems. After the axiomatic foundation of coherent risk measures the application of risk measures to inventory models such as Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) or convex combinations of mean and CVaR became popular. In our work we apply spectral risk measures to the single-period, single-item, linear cost inventory control & pricing problem (also known as newsvendor problem) and derive optimal policies. By doing so, we are able to unify results obtained so far in the literature under the common concept of spectral risk measures for the case of zero and non-zero shortage penalty cost. In particular, we show convexity results and structural properties for the inventory control and, under some assumptions, unimodality results as well as structural properties for the joint inventory & pricing problem. An extensive numerical analysis illustrates the findings. (author's abstract)

This thesis analyses the evaluation of various delivery-services in the business to consumer fraction of e-commerce. Simplified it can be said, that businesses try to satisfy the so called "convenience factor" of the growing segment of single households and double-income households through their online shopping activities, which is mirrored in the substantial growth-rates of e-commerce in the industrial nations. The efficiency of such a system, however, is determined by logistical effectiveness in particular concerning the "last-mile" between the final distribution point and the consumer. The study is therefore aimed at evaluating the relevance and sequence of the main components of a delivery service by the customer and thereby to also examine the acceptance of so called "Box-Systems" as opposed to conventional delivery systems in Austria. As the acceptance of online shopping is closely related to the acceptance and use of the internet this thesis begins with an introductory chapter on the trends of internet use in Austria followed by an analysis of the problems of delivery in long distance commerce with emphasis on the last-mile problematic. A short description and classification of the statistical method of Conjoint Measurement sets the framework for the development and structuring of the survey as a basis for the empirical study. This method allows the author to measure the importance of the constitutive factors on the sequence of the different options. Finally the empirical study in the form of a survey with a sample size of 189 evaluated questionnaires is described and the results are analysed. The study reveals that overall the place of delivery is the most important criterion closely followed by price, whereas the time of delivery only plays a secondary role and punctuality seems to constitute the crucial competitive edge. In addition the partworths also reveal a number of new findings, especially concerning time frames. (author's abstract) / Series: Schriftenreihe des Instituts für Transportwirtschaft und Logistik - Logistik

Supply chain management (SCM) has become one of the most popular and fastest growing areas in management. One major issue of SCM is the proper design of supply chains to serve customers effectively (high customer service) and efficiently (at low costs). This is particularly difficult as companies nowadays face a series of challenges like shrinking product life cycles, the proliferation of product variants (mass customization), and increasing uncertainty on both the demand and the supply side. Dealing efficiently with uncertainty is one of the most crucial points in supply chain design. According to Lovejoy (1998) a company has three generic possibilities to address uncertainty: it can either hold safety inventory, hold safety capacity, or reduce variability by using enhanced information. These three strategies constitute the so-called Operations management (OM) triangle. This study will analyze whether and how variability can be reduced in supply chains and thereby improve process performance of supply chains. This means that the concept of OM triangle is extended and linked to concepts from SCM, with a special focus on the analysis of the role of information and its capability for reducing variability. As one result of this study a new variability framework is presented, organizing the different types of variability in supply chains. Second, the extended OM triangle is eveloped, linking concepts from SCM to the OM triangle. Finally, it can be stated that handling variability within the supply chain is major challenge for every supply chain manager, as there is always some kind of uncertainty or variability. This study may help to organize this broad field of action within supply chains. (author's abstract)

In Zeiten zunehmend globaler Wertschöpfungsketten und damit komplexerer und intransparenter Warenströme, werden Konsumenten immer mehr bedacht darauf, einer Instanz vertrauen zu können, welche sogenannte Gütesiegel vergibt. Im Fall von FAIRTRADE handelt es sich um ein überwiegend soziales Siegel, welches für faire Löhne/Preise und menschenwürdige Arbeitsbedingungen steht. Um dieses Vertrauen zu rechtfertigen muss ein effektives Kontrollsystem für den Waren- und Geldfluss etabliert sein. 70% der österreichischen Konsumenten halten die Hersteller- bzw. Ursprungsgarantie für sehr wichtig oder wichtig für das Image von FAIRTRADE. 92% für sehr wichtig bis mittelmäßig wichtig. Diese Zahlen zeigen die Priorität der Kontrolle durch FLOCert und die Bedeutung der Qualität der Kontrolle für den "Markenwert" auf. Die rechtlichen und ökonomischen Rahmenbedingungen der heutigen Zeit legen nahe, von einer reinen expost Betrachtung der gehandelten Mengen zu einer Rückverfolgbarkeit einzelner Einheiten bzw. Chargen überzugehen. Dies wird von FAIRTRADE auch als ein langfristiges Ziel angesehen. Zu diesem Zweck sollte FLOCert aber möglichst bald die nötigen Ressourcen aufwenden, um, gemeinsam mit den Kunden (den zertifizierten Unternehmen, Kooperativen usw.) Schritte einzuleiten, welche das Netzwerk von dem derzeitigen Zustand zu einer Traceability hinführen. Dies ist eine strategische Entscheidung und somit ohnehin ein langfristiger Prozess, der aber die Allokation angemessener Mittel erfordert. In Zukunft werden stabile und verlässliche Traceabilitysysteme immer öfter zu Wettbewerbsvorteilen ganzer Supply Chains. Beispiele erfolgreicher Implementierung von Rückverfolgbarkeitssystemen mit abgestimmten Stammdaten haben gezeigt, dass sich die Produktivität und der Absatz steigern lassen, dass Fehlbestände und inkonsistente Daten reduziert werden und Geschäftsprozesse verbessert werden können.Und genau bei diesen Fragen der Datenkonsistenz, der Doppelgleisigkeiten, der Fehler bei der Eingabe durch viele klarschriftliche Angaben und zahlreicher Mensch-Maschine-Interaktionen besteht im derzeitigen System jedenfalls Verbesserungspotential. Zudem ist die Frage des Wettbewerbsvorteils für das FAIRTRADE System relevant. Auch in diesem Markt herrscht Konkurrenz, welche aufgrund der höheren Nachfrage der Kunden ständig wächst. Ein verlässliches und starkes Kontrollsystem steigert das Vertrauen der Kunden und erhöht somit den Markenwert. Auch die technologischen Entwicklungen in diesem Bereich sind dabei zu beachten. Die Radio Frequency Identification mit dem Electronic Product Code als Identifikationsnummer basiert auf der ehemaligen EAN-Nummer. Unternehmen und Supply Chains, welche den Rückverfolgbarkeitsprozess schon weitgehend implementiert haben, werden beim Umstieg auf die neue Identifikationstechnologie klar im Vorteil sein. Der EPC bietet unter anderem dem Konsumenten die Möglichkeit einzelne, individuelle Produkte einer Charge zu identifizieren und über das World Wide Web mehr produktspezifische Informationen zu erhalten. Das könnten auch Informationen zur Herkunft des Produktes bzw. zur gesamten Wertschöpfungskette sein, was gerade für ein Geschäftsmodell wie jenes von FAIRTRADE relevant wäre. Eine "virtuelle Verbindung" zwischen dem Endkonsumenten und den Kleinbauern, denen durch den Kauf dieses Produktes geholfen wird, herzustellen, könnte ein Ziel für die Zukunft sein, dessen Grundstein aber jetzt gelegt werden sollte. (Autorenref.) / Series: Schriftenreihe des Instituts für Transportwirtschaft und Logistik - Supply Chain Management

In many firms the pricing and inventory control functions are separated. However, a number of theoretical models suggest a joint determination of inventory levels and prices, as prices also affect stocking risks. In this work, we address the problem of simultaneously determining a pricing and inventory replenishment strategy under reference price effects. This reference price effect models the empirically well established fact that consumers not only react sensitively to the current price, but also to deviations from a reference price formed on the basis of past purchases. The current price is then perceived as a discount or surcharge relative to this reference price. Thus, immediate effects of price reductions on profits have to be weighted against the resulting losses in future periods. We study how the additional dynamics of the consumers' willingness to pay affect an optimal pricing and inventory control model and whether a simple policy such as a base-stock-list-price policy holds in such a setting. For a one-period planning horizon we analytically prove the optimality of a base-stock-list-price policy with respect to the reference price under general conditions. We then extend this result to the two-period time horizon for the linear and loss-neutral demand function and to the multi-period case under even more restrictive assumptions. However, numerical simulations suggest that a base-stock-list-price policy is also optimal for the multi-period setting under more general conditions. We furthermore show by numerical investigations that the presence of reference price effects decreases the incentive for price discounts to deal with overstocked situations. Moreover, we find that the potential benefits from simultaneously determining optimal prices and stocking quantities compared to a sequential procedure can increase considerably, when reference price effects are included in the model. This makes an integration of pricing and inventory control with reference price effects by all means worth the effort. (author's abstract)

Measuring the performance of Freight Villages (FVs) has important implications for logistics companies and other related companies as well as governments. In this paper we apply Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to measure the performance of European FVs in a purely data-driven way incorporating the nature of FVs as complex operations that use multiple inputs and produce several outputs. We employ several DEA models and perform a complete sensitivity analysis of the appropriateness of the chosen input and output variables, and an assessment of the robustness of the efficiency score. It turns out that about half of the 20 FVs analyzed are inefficient, with utilization of the intermodal area and warehouse capacity and level of goods handed the being the most important areas of improvement. While we find no significant differences in efficiency between FVs of different sizes and in different countries, it turns out that the FVs Eurocentre Toulouse, Interporto Quadrante Europa and GVZ Nürnberg constitute more than 90% of the benchmark share. / Series: Working Papers on Information Systems, Information Business and Operations