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.

The coordination of all supply chain members has become a crucial issue in ensuring the success of supply chain management. The streamline of the inter-organizational coordination such as material flow/distribution, information flow/exchange, and product planning/development are required to facilitate the efficient operation of supply chain. To further sustain the competitive edge (e.g.,time-to-market) of a supply chain, the coordination mechanism has become an emerging research issue in current supply chain management. This study looks into a cause model of the information sharing of supply chain members.The impact of trust and commitment on information sharing mechanism is then examined. The data from 122 senior managers participating in Supply Chain Management activeities were collected and empirically tested. The results show that the trust is significantly impact on the quality of information sharing in e-business supply chain. The member¡¦s long-term commitment also affects the dedicated partner-based process of supply chain management. Moreover, the dedicated partner-based processes will effectively reduce the supply chain uncertainty and high quality information improves significantly the operation efficiency between supply chain enterprises.

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Global competition and electronic business is the inevitable for enterprises in the twenty-one century. Information technology for enterprises is just tools. According to an enterprise¡¦s role that is played in its supply chain and functions that is providing products¡¦ value, an enterprise apply business process design should display the advantage of electronic business. According to the Value System and the Supply Chain macro view, the research analyzed business processes and proposed a business process design approach, named ¡§Collaborated Design Approach of Business Process¡¨, to apply to enterprises collaboration and electronic business. Five steps composed the approach. The first step is Value System analysis to define the Value System, critical activities and linkages. And according that, the research defined the architecture of business core processes and linkages. The secondary step is business core process design. Based on the Value chain, the research explored the relations between demands, supplies and control, and proposed business processes integrated design directions. The third step is an analytic characteristic of supply chain. The research analyzed the supply chain variations with business process design. The forth step is processes simulated and analytic. The research simulated and evaluated the supply chain variations with business process design. The fifth step is the process operational strategy. The ¡§Process operational strategy matrix¡¨ that presented by the research, the research proposed suggestions of inbound and outbound logistics process operational strategies. The research use the supply chain of a famous brand sports shoes company as case study to instructed how to apply the ¡¨Collaborated Design Approach of Business Process¡¨.

Original equipment manufacture(OEM) is typically the role played by the high-tech or traditional industries in Taiwan, and is marked by highly efficient vertical supply chains where division of manufacturing function is done very well. Supply chain management could help companies to integrate their business process and information systems. Moreover, what kind of strategies needed to be adopted, and what kind of information needed to be exchanged transaction. The research issues regarding supply chain strategy and information sharing become apparently important. In the study, supply chain type and supply chain uncertainty are the two major constructs that guide our research. Convergent assembly supply network is type of supply chain selected for case study, and the automotive industry is the actual case for research. The research results indicated that information sharing is most intensive between suppliers and manufacturers. The lack of coordination between production and sale in manufacturer was resulted from supply chain uncertainty which can be addresses by the aspects of procurement, manufacturing, and demand respectively. The current supply chain strategy of manufacturer has push more inventory to its suppliers. This is due to the made-to-stock(MTS) method applied by the manufacturer. In addition, continuous flow process has occupied part of the manufacturing process for automobile production, and high uncertainty resulted from this stage often led to problems for delivery of product parts in the subsequent stages. Furthermore, demand uncertainty and mass customization requirement from the manufacturer have push suppliers to get timely sale information in order to have quick response to orders. Based on the case findings, this research suggested propositions regarding supply chain strategies and information sharing for the convergent assembly supply network. Because of relatively high procurement and demand uncertainty, the MTS production strategy should be switched to assembly-to-order(ATO). In addition, it is necessary for the manufacturer to establish stable relationship with suppliers, and incorporate them into product development process. This will help the manufacturer to achieve ATO and shorten product development time due to the notion of design for assembly and concurrent engineering. For information sharing in supply chains, the focus is upon shop floor information transparency between suppliers and the manufacturer, exchange of sale information between suppliers and distributors, and exchange of information regarding quality, management capability, product development between suppliers and the manufacturer.

<p>The future has always caught the attention of the human being. The thirst of exploring the future and to know the unknown has driven the human being toward innovativeness.</p><p>Companies are expanding their operations worldwide since the past few decades. Profit growth coupled with an effective strategy has become the primary need of global companies. Research in this area has given rise to optimization of the supply chain for higher profitability. Considering the overall strategy the company needs to plan production well in advance. The operational planning comes in picture at this moment. In order to reduce excessive inventory at each stage of the production; one should know the demand of the next stage and preferably the end customer demand. The process of sales forecasting is undertaken to predict demand at different stages. It is a complex managerial function and hence needed to be undertaken by a scientific way. The sales forecasting the function includes process of forecasting, administration, hardware, software, users and developers of forecast.</p><p>Historically sales forecasting has been considered as a side activity by most of the companies. Sales forecasting has not been considered as an important function of marketing and finance. Very few companies have seen sales forecasting by a scientific management point of view. Less research has been reported in sales forecasting in comparison to other managerial functions. Planning based on sales forecasting; may be part of a selected strategy for growth and profitability. These facts have attracted us to study sales forecasting as a managerial function.</p><p>The purpose of this study is to describe and analyze the sales forecasting process, sales forecasting system, sales forecasting methods and techniques. Further proposing possibilities of improvements in existing forecasting process is also purpose of this study.</p><p>We have selected three manufacturing companies for this study based on purposive sampling. Considering research interest in phenomenon study; we have selected a qualitative research strategy for this study. We have selected a case study method for our research as it is the most appropriate tool to study the relation between theory and phenomenon. For this research, we have collected the data by semistructured interviews based on a pre formed questionnaire. The questionnaire has been prepared with respect to our research purpose and open ended questions were used to gather extensive data. The data gathered during interviews, have been analyzed by the use of ‘Flow model’ suggested by Miles and Huberman (1994).</p><p>Results from this study shows that there is a need to see ‘sales forecasting’ as a management function rather than a computer activity. To achieve the best information integration throughout the supply chain, increased information visibility is needed. To achieve accuracy in both forecasting and planning; collaborative forecasting may be used. Forecasting software needs to have a suite of methods towards product specific forecasting. The need of customized softwares has also been indicated by this study. The need to measure performance of forecasting by means of accuracy, cost and customer relationship has been concluded.</p>