Tendering process is central to national government in South Africa. The goods and services bought by national government in South Africa represent a large amount of public money, and it is very important that national government put in place measure to manage how these goods and services are acquired. In the main government acquire goods and services through tender system and the focus of the study was tendering process in national government in South Africa. The amount of public resources that national government uses in the tendering process is huge and is approximately over 20% of GDP, which has direct implication for service delivery and job creation as well as redressing past discrimination by empowering designated groups of peoples to receive preference in tendering. South Africa is one of the countries with the highest level of corruption rate in the world, of which tender fraud and corruption play a major part. Considering that, the reform of tendering process in national government is therefore inevitable and has to take place. The primary objective of this study is to analyse national government tender system, and identify the tendering problems facing South African national departments. The study further made practical recommendations to National Government, National Treasury, and all the relevant stakeholders relating to the management of tendering process. Data from 355 questionnaires completed by participants, represented 45 national department was collected and analysed. This study found that national government is facing major challenges in managing of tendering process, and these challenges relates to implementation and adoption of the code of best practice. The most important conclusions drawn from the study are: * The department complies with all the above legislation and keep the rules as stipulated in the legislation; * There is a need to issue a single national legislative framework in terms of section 76(4)(c) of the PFMA to guide uniformity in tendering process; * The tendering legislations and its associated regulations are complex and may make it difficult to implement correctly; * The department follow all tendering process generic steps at all times; * The current evaluation system is not a good system and is biased towards the lowest price bidders; * The current tendering practices in government are outdated and inefficient; * Tender practitioners are not adequately trained in the application of the tender process and its associated regulations; * The departments did not keep a detailed and consistent documentation of all events of the whole tendering procedure at all times; * The current tendering practices do not conform to internationally accepted best practices; * The department’s tendering function is not carried out in a cost–effective way; and * The current tendering system is fair, encourages competition, and has integrity. Practical recommendations are suggested to ensure the effective management of tendering process in national government. / Thesis (MBA)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2012.

This study considers whether or not optimizing process metrics and settings across a supply chain gives significantly different outcomes than consideration at a firm level. While, the importance of supply chain integration has been shown in areas such as inventory management, this study appears to be the first empirical test for optimizing process settings. A Partial Least Squares (PLS) procedure is used to determine the crucial components and indicators that make up each component in a supply chain system. PLS allows supply chain members to have a greater understanding of critical coordination components in a given supply chain. Results and implications give an indication of what performance is possible with supply chain optimization versus local optimization on simulated and manufacturing data. It was found that pursuing an integrated approach over a traditional independent approach provides an improvement of 2% to 49% in predictive power for the supply chain under study.

The objective of the study was to develop a management framework for internal logistics in the Department of Education in Gauteng. For the purpose of this study internal logistics was defined as the complete process of obtaining goods and services from the compiling and processing of requisitions to the payment of invoices and the record keeping of all transactions to achieve organisational objectives. Internal logistics entails purchase planning, specification development, supplier research, contract administration and quotations, ordering and inventory control. The management of internal logistics can enhance productivity and performance within the value chain, improving service delivery, the outcome of the audited financial statement and ultimately the optimal spending of the allocated budget per financial year. For three consecutive financial years (2006/2007, 2007/2008, 2008/2009) GDE received a qualified audited financial statement. For financial years 2009/2010 and 2010/2011 GDE succeeded to receive an unqualified audited financial statement. To maintain this achievement and ultimately receive a clean audit financial statement, it is necessary to evaluate all the business processes, specifically within supply chain management, contributing to the audit findings. Supply Chain Management (SCM) is in some way the completion of the circle of financial management. It is important for GDE to develop a uniform internal logistics framework that would enable them to also gain the maximum from its annual allocated budget. It is also critical that the internal logistics are attended to as soon as possible to have a positive input towards the audited financial statement. A literature study was done on the concepts of the value chain, supply chain management and the management of knowledge. A questionnaire was designed, based on the findings in the literature, and used to measure the efficiency of the internal logistics in the District offices. The state of the internal logistics at the District offices was assessed through survey questionnaires to extract the data. It became evident that certain gaps and problems exist in relation to internal logistics at the District offices and that knowledge management is related to these gaps and problems. Internal logistics has a link with the elements of supply chain management as investigated in the literature study. The elements of supply chain management can to be broken down into clear activities for the management of internal logistics. The key area of concern is that the internal logistics within SCM are not acknowledged and therefore not properly managed in the District offices. The result of this is that the allocated budget is not optimally utilised and also receives qualifications from the audited financial statement. A practical framework to manage internal logistics is proposed for the Department of Education to assist with the problems, and to bridge the gaps found after analysing the questionnaires. The findings of the empirical study were used as the basis of the framework. Finally, conclusions and recommendations are drawn and rendered in order to improve the logistics management of the Department of Education in Gauteng. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2012.

Tendering process is central to national government in South Africa. The goods and services bought by national government in South Africa represent a large amount of public money, and it is very important that national government put in place measure to manage how these goods and services are acquired. In the main government acquire goods and services through tender system and the focus of the study was tendering process in national government in South Africa. The amount of public resources that national government uses in the tendering process is huge and is approximately over 20% of GDP, which has direct implication for service delivery and job creation as well as redressing past discrimination by empowering designated groups of peoples to receive preference in tendering. South Africa is one of the countries with the highest level of corruption rate in the world, of which tender fraud and corruption play a major part. Considering that, the reform of tendering process in national government is therefore inevitable and has to take place. The primary objective of this study is to analyse national government tender system, and identify the tendering problems facing South African national departments. The study further made practical recommendations to National Government, National Treasury, and all the relevant stakeholders relating to the management of tendering process. Data from 355 questionnaires completed by participants, represented 45 national department was collected and analysed. This study found that national government is facing major challenges in managing of tendering process, and these challenges relates to implementation and adoption of the code of best practice. The most important conclusions drawn from the study are: * The department complies with all the above legislation and keep the rules as stipulated in the legislation; * There is a need to issue a single national legislative framework in terms of section 76(4)(c) of the PFMA to guide uniformity in tendering process; * The tendering legislations and its associated regulations are complex and may make it difficult to implement correctly; * The department follow all tendering process generic steps at all times; * The current evaluation system is not a good system and is biased towards the lowest price bidders; * The current tendering practices in government are outdated and inefficient; * Tender practitioners are not adequately trained in the application of the tender process and its associated regulations; * The departments did not keep a detailed and consistent documentation of all events of the whole tendering procedure at all times; * The current tendering practices do not conform to internationally accepted best practices; * The department’s tendering function is not carried out in a cost–effective way; and * The current tendering system is fair, encourages competition, and has integrity. Practical recommendations are suggested to ensure the effective management of tendering process in national government. / Thesis (MBA)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2012.

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Business-to-business exchanges have become a common form of procurement due to their advantages regarding flexibility (such as the ability of being able to quickly change business partners), although the mean procurement prices are generally higher compared to long-term contracts. On the other side, a lot of procurement managers still believe that long-term relationships are the key in the procurement process partly due to cost savings. Two main conflicting opinions on the optimal type of relationship - as it seems. In this thesis, a portfolio approach for risk-hedging supply chains in dynamic business environments is presented, where uncertainties are defined by value ranges in addition to target or mean values. This portfolio approach combines the advantages of both relationship types - spot market and long-term relationship - while avoiding influences of disadvantages. This portfolio approach uses simulation techniques in order to find portfolio and contract settings that coordinate supply chain partners and achieves cost-optimal supply chain performance in dynamic business environments. Furthermore, inventory is used as real option in an approach that is called speculative forward procurement. Speculative forward procurement is shown to be advantageous for the overall performance of supply chains in nearly all simulation settings. The presented model is developed and evaluated using a real supply chain process of the chemical processing industry. If procurement managers use a portfolio approach and speculative forward procurement, it is shown that cost savings of more than 10 % compared to only using the spot market and about 5 % compared to the use of long-term relationships for coordinating settings can be achieved. (author's abstract)

We study three problems on supply chain location and inventory under uncertainty. In Chapter 2, we study the inventory purchasing and allocation problem in a movie rental chain under demand uncertainty. We formulate this problem as a newsvendor-like problem with multiple rental opportunities. We study several demand and return forecasting models based on comparable films using iterative maximum likelihood estimation and Bayesian estimation via Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation. Test results on data from a large movie rental firm reveal systematic under-buying of movies purchased through revenue sharing contracts and over-buying of movies purchased through standard ones. For the movies considered, the model estimates an increase in the average profit per title for new movies by 15.5% and 2.5% for revenue sharing and standard titles, respectively. We discuss the implications of revenue sharing on the profitability of both the rental firm and the studio. In Chapter 3, we focus on the effect of travel time uncertainty on the location of facilities that provide service within a given coverage radius on the transportation network. Three models - expected covering, robust covering and expected p-robust covering - are studied; each appropriate for different types of facilities. Exact and approximate algorithms are developed. The models are used to analyze the location of fire stations in the city of Toronto. Using real traffic data we show that the current system design is quite far from optimality and provide recommendations for improving the performance. In Chapter 4, we continue our analysis in Chapter 3 to study the trade-off between adding new facilities versus relocating some existing facilities. We consider a multi-objective problem that aims at minimizing the number of facility relocations while maximizing expected and worst case network coverage. Exact and approximate algorithms are developed to solve three variations of the problem and find expected--worst case trade-off curves for any given number of relocations. The models are used to analyze the addition of four new fire stations to the city of Toronto. Our results suggest that the benefit of adding four new stations is achievable, at a lower cost, by relocating 4-5 stations.

Because the business environment has changed (e.g., volatility in demand, curtailment of product life cycle, changing of information technology, and so forth), corporate supply chains become more network-connected and involve more business partners. Whether the company has the capability to operate well in such supply chain network becomes a significant issue. To fulfill this need, this research aims to develop a framework for measuring the supply chain capability. The literature review and company interviews allow us to propose four capabilities and relative measurements. A field survey is then conducted in the Taiwan PC industry to assess the measurements. To ensure the measurements are valid, we apply two-step measurement assessments: the factor analysis and initial reliability are first conducted and then followed by item-total correlation, optimal reliability coefficients, convergent validity, and discriminant validity. The resulting model is an 18-item and three-dimension construct. The three dimensions are: (1) reducing transaction related risk, (2) promoting good relationship, and (3) managing environment change. The confirmatory factor analysis then suggests us to arrange the three dimensions in two groups. The first group includes the first dimension, indicating the firm capability, and the second group includes the other two, expressing the inter-firm capability. We further explore the relationships between the supply chain capabilities and IOS adoption, as well as supply chain roles. It is interestingly to note that different IOS requires different capability and so does different supply chain roles. Therefore, the contribution of this research can be two-folded: first, the managers can use this reference framework to diagnose the supply chain capability of their own firms, finding their strength and weakness. Second, managers can use the framework to evaluate the capability of their partners and better gauge the characteristics of the supply chain collaboration. This research can also contribute to the IT literature as the researchers can build upon this model to further examine of the factors that are discovered.

Supply chain scheduling (SCS) emerged as a result of the integrated Supply Chain Management concept and should be incorporated in planning and operating Supply Chain (SC). The review of literature indicated integration of SCS in the SC is still far from being achieved. Recognising that optimisation of scheduling activities separately will only lead to local optima, this research proposes a SCS global optimisation through the integration of scheduling within manufacturing and distribution networks. / Thesis (PhD)--University of South Australia, 2008.

München, Techn. Universiẗat, Diss., 2007.