Abstract When the enterprise competition is no longer the individual show that will play singles fights alone, but is the supply chain or the network team war. The partnership importance grows day by day. In transforming process from ¡§you, I¡¨ to ¡§us¡¨, the reciprocal benefit and mutual trust are playing tug-of-war with the self-interest and selfishness, that will cause the synthesis effect by the cooperation or perhaps will make loss because of noncooperation. This research origin is created by a new born venture case of an international merger & acquisition. As a result of product characteristic is combined by the electronic and textile industry, collected on the modern science and technology and traditional process in a body. It faced the defeat and crisis because of the careless and indiscreet on the partnership management. After redesigning the transnational organization and establishing the unique supply chain, actually the cooperation synthesis effect causes the new venture to develop turns defeat into victory. The market share and the profit rate large are getting better. It also integrates the resources to get fine solid market competitive power. However, after we get the factors of the goal, the benefit, the risk, the specialty and the share, the communication and the culture, promise and crisis, how to carry on the management to obtain the high quality partner cooperation? This research utilized the qualitative case study technique, reconstructed the experience to narrated three sections of stories, the dialectical analysis will inquire into the enterprise merger & acquisition, the transnational associates and the core supplier partnership management to get the conclusion and the principle as below. 1. The partnership of the enterprise merger & acquisition started from¡§the common interest¡¨, but is terminated easy by¡§the crisis¡¨. 2. The partnership of the transnational associates was established on¡§specialty¡¨and facilitated the cooperation with¡§communication¡¨. simultaneously we must paid attention to the difference of¡§the culture¡¨extremely, and established ¡§the share¡¨ interaction, but can avoid both sides did not cooperate or is perfunctory to develop partnership because of the inter-competition point of view. 3. The core supplier's partnership, must be established above the long-term strategy, both sides were working by the supplementary operation pattern,set up¡§the common goal¡¨as the cooperation principle, and do the management and the execution to solid ¡§promise¡¨, and must positively manage the conflict of ¡§the culture¡¨ difference.

This thesis examines the labor force participation decisions of married couples, and special attention is paid to a spouse’s health conditions affecting their own and the spouse’s labor force participation decision. I used the Health and Retirement Study survey data and estimated a seemingly unrelated bivariate probit model. A number of variables besides health condition were added: age, education level, and family unearned income. The results of this research paper support the findings from the relevant literature that the labor supply decisions of the husband and wife are related. The oldest age group is least likely to work. The younger the husband, the more likely it is that the husband will work. At the ages between 40 and 49, wives have the biggest probability to work. The higher the education level, the more likely it is that a spouse is going to work. The more total family unearned income, the less probable the spouse will go to work. Poor health has a negative effect on labor force participation and a positive effect for the spouse’s labor force participation.

This dissertation is focused on investigating the integration of inventory and facility location decisions in different supply chain settings. Facility location and inventory decisions are interdependent due to the economies of scale that are inherent in transportation and replenishment costs. The facility location decisions have an impact on the transportation and replenishment costs which, in turn, affect the optimal inventory policy. On the other hand, the inventory policy dictates the frequency of shipments to replenish inventory which, in turn, affects the number of deliveries, and, hence, the transportation costs, between the facilities. Therefore, our main research objectives are to: • compare the optimal facility location, determined by minimizing total transportation costs, to the one determined by the models that also consider the timing and quantity of inventory replenishments and corresponding costs, • investigate the effect of facility location decisions on optimal inventory decisions, and • measure the impact of integrated decision-making on overall supply chain cost performance. Placing a special emphasis on the explicit modeling of transportation costs, we develop several novel models in mixed integer linear and nonlinear optimization programming. Based on how the underlying facility location problem is modeled, these models fall into two main groups: 1) continuous facility location problems, and 2) discrete facility location problems. For the stylistic models, the focus is on the development of analytical solutions. For the more general models, the focus is on the development of efficient algorithms. Our results demonstrate • the impact of explicit transportation costs on integrated decisions, • the impact of different transportation cost functions on integrated decisions in the context of continuous facility location problems of interest, • the value of integrated decision-making in different supply chain settings, and • the performance of solution methods that jointly optimize facility location and inventory decisions.

In current research literature, supply chain management (SCM) is a hot topic breaching the boundaries of many academic disciplines. SCM-related work can be found in the relevant literature for many disciplines. Supply chain management can be defined as effectively and efficiently managing the flows (information, financial and physical) in all stages of the supply chain to add value to end customers and gain profit for all firms in the chain. Supply chains involve multiple partners with the common goal to satisfy customer demand at a profit. While supply chains are not new, the way academics and practitioners view the need for and the means to manage these chains is relatively new. Very little literature can be found on designing supply chains from the ground up or what dimensions of supply chain management should be considered when designing a supply chain. Additionally, we have found that very few tools exist to help during the design phase of a supply chain. Moreover, very few tools exist that allow for comparing supply chain designs. We contribute to the current literature by determining which supply chain management dimensions should be considered during the design process. We employ text mining to create a supply chain design conceptual model and compare this model to existing supply chain models and reference frameworks. We continue to contribute to the current SCM literature by applying a creative application of concepts and results in the field of Stochastic Processes to build a custom simulator capable of comparing different supply chain designs and providing insights into how the different designs affect the supply chain’s total inventory cost. The simulator provides a mechanism for testing when real-time demand information is more beneficial than using first-come, first-serve (FCFS) order processing when the distributional form of lead-time demand is derived from the supply chain operating characteristics instead of using the assumption that lead-time demand distributions are known. We find that in many instances FCFS out-performs the use of real-time information in providing the lowest total inventory cost.

As semiconductor technology is scaled and voltage level is reduced, the impact of the variation in power supply has become very significant in predicting the realistic worst-case delays in integrated circuits. The analysis of power supply noise is inevitable because high correlations exist between supply voltage and delay. Supply noise analysis has often used a vector-based timing analysis approach. Finding a set of test vectors in vector-based approaches, however, is very expensive, particularly during the design phase, and becomes intractable for larger circuits in DSM technology. In this work, two novel vectorless approaches are described such that increases in circuit delay, because of power supply noise, can be efficiently, quickly estimated. Experimental results on ISCAS89 circuits reveal the accuracy and efficiency of my approaches: in s38417 benchmark circuits, errors on circuit delay distributions are less than 2%, and both of my approaches are 67 times faster than the traditional vector-based approach. Also, the results show the importance of considering care-bits, which sensitize the longest paths during the power supply noise analysis.

The changing role of manufacturing has ushered in an increasing number of initiatives aimed at improving operations. Specifically, various themes in operations have evolved over time, from forecasting and planning in the 1950s and 1960s through productivity and quality in the 1970s and 1980s respectively, to adaptability and responsiveness in the 1990s. Even though the emergence of agile paradigm had spurred a large stream of research by scholars, yet most of the research had been at the manufacturing level. Very few researches have gone beyond the manufacturing level to the larger supply chain level. And there are even fewer researches discussing about the combination of lean thinking and agile thinking in supply chain level. Based on the above statement, the purpose of this study is as follows: 1. To identify the definition and characteristics of ¡§Lean¡¨ and ¡§Agile¡¨. 2. To explore the relationship of the two kinds of thinking. 3. To prove the practicability of the findings. This research is organized as follows. Chapter 2 clearly describes the origin, definition and characteristics of lean thinking and agile thinking, and comparison of the two kind of thinking. Chapter 3 introduces the major combination factors of these- material decoupling point, information decoupling point, and postponement. Followed by introduction of three practical ways to combine the lean thinking and agile thinking.

With the development of globalized and liberalized economy, the work allocate becomes more precise and the product life cycle becomes shorter. For many firms, in a changing era and intense global competition environment, effective supply chain management can help organizations to achieve competitive advantage in facing future challenge. This study was according to the Tan¡¦s (2002) research on the supply chain management (SCM) with some measures modified from the viewpoint of actuality. 206 samples were collected. The objective of this study was to derive a set of SCM practices and to identify the major concerns in implementing a successful SCM program. This study also relates the practices and concerns to firm¡¦s performance by means of correlation analysis and multiple linear regression analysis. The major findings are: (1) identified 25 items of practices and 11 items of concerns that are critical for the successful SCM. (2) supply chain integrated, supply management, and strategy planning are significant correlation with performance. (3) different position has significant perception difference in performance; customer service quality has the most significant perception difference in each demographic variables.

This research attempts to investigate the collaborative commerce in steel industry and is divided into two dimensions. First, it investigates the case of China Steel Corporation system, addressing its order fullfillment process. The researcher has been in charge of planning and developing the electronic commerce of China Steel Corporation since 1998. He has been dealing with answering the enquiry about e-commerce from the customers for a long time and has taken part in the whole process of collaborating CSC e-commerce with customers. Therefore, the main method to collect data of this study is through observation. Second, this study synthesizes the references on the three-layer framework of enterprise and enterprise collaboration (CHIU, CHEUNG and TILL, 2003), the case study on the business rules of order fulfillment collaborative operating system, and web service. Then, it tries to build a framework of collaborative commerce system based on the web service and expect to improve the process of order fulfillment to steel supply. This research summarizes the twelve issues of order fulfillment into four collaborative requirements: requirement collaboration, order collaboration, production collaboration, and e-Logistics Collaboration. This study provides the collaborative process system design and construction steps to strengthen the steel order fulfillment. This case is based on the moment punctual producing rate and presumes the advantages of collaborative operating system in strengthening order fulfillment. And it indeed has the merits of promoting punctual order fulfillment.

The view of procurement and partnership management with the supplier has been drastically changed for many enterprises, because of the emergence of Internet and Electrical Commerce in the present age. The way of competition between enterprises has been combined into the supply chain. We believe that the implementation of e-procurement will contribute to the increasing of gross profit, benefit and competitiveness undoubtedly. For the big firm like integrated steel mill, it is definitely necessary to simplify the complicated purchasing procedure, so that the tactical issue of e-procurement just can create high value from the procurement. In this thesis, an Innovation Adoption model is proposed to study the e-procurement adoption intention by MRO supplier of Taiwan¡¦s steel industry, and it¡¦s impact on supply chain also has been evaluated. Based on relevant research, the Innovation Diffusion adoption model in the thesis is proposed, which is composed of three major perspectives including environment, organization, and e-procurement technology factor. Besides, related issues in each perspectives are also addressed. Furthermore, two perspectives of partnership and achievement of supplier are also proposed to study the impact of the performance of supply chain. The conclusion of this research indicates that supplier will increase the intension of adopting e-procurement depends on buyer¡¦s resource support as well as buyer¡¦s coercive power. In addition, top management support of supplier is a important factor for the adoption. Besides, market share and transaction frequency in the e-procurement represent buyer being a significant customer will enforce the will of supplier to corporate with buyer to adopt e-procurement. Furthermore, result from regression analysis shows that Trust is major influential factor for the performance of supply chain. However, influence of Trust will be reduced, because of perceived cost being emphasized. The transaction mechanism of e-procurement should provide a fair and transparency transaction platform, so that supplier will corporate to enforce the performance of entire supply chain. According to the research result, some of the advisements for the supplier and buyer were also discussed in thesis

Nowadays, the trend of maximizing the liquid crystal display panels makes the display firms and the upper suppliers hold the passive and disadvantaged position in Taiwan TFT-LCD industry, and cannot but push them follow Korea¡¦s strategies to set up new plants and promote the yield continuously. However, setting up a new plant indeed costs a lot, thus, how to reduce the total cost of the supply chain becomes an urgent key point in TFT-LCD industry. Therefore, the co-operative relationship between the upper key component firms and the middle panel firms, the complementary and complete extend of the materials, equipment and the key components can be highly home-manufactured or not, becomes the most important subjects. For this reason, how to help Taiwan¡¦s TFT-LCD industry acquire the active and predominant position is worth studying. The major TFT-LCD suppliers of technology and equipment in Taiwan still have to depend on Japan. Thus, this research intends to focuses on the large-size TFT-LCD firms and analyzes the present situation with the following three dimensions: 1. Can Taiwanese firms gain the active and dominant position with continuously building up plants and complete localized supply chain in TFT-LCD industry? 2. Discuss the level of completeness between the TFT-LCD panel firms and the upper key components firms with equipment and materials to survey that TFT-LCD industry is self-contained or not in Taiwan. 3. How to speed up the whole supply chain of TFT-LCD industry and makes it come into being. Eventually, this research results in three findings of TFT-LCD industry: 1.Crystal cycles happen repeatedly, and it not only fluctuates obviously but shorten the circular interval as well. 2. The technologies of TFT-LCD alternate rapidly. 3. The supply chain of Taiwanese TFT-LCD industry is not self-contained enough. In addition, the integrated and localized ability is over-slack. In conclusion, I take one foreign and one domestic industry-upgraded cases for examples, and try to figure out the constructive and positive guiding principle for the TFT-LCD industry and the following studies in the future. Key words: TFT-LCD, key components, supply chain.