The poor trust culture in the construction sector is often considered an inhibiting factor to collaboration success in the United Kingdom (UK) despite reform efforts. Numerous reform initiatives tend to have focused on improvements in client and main contractor aspects of construction supply chain relationships, prompting claims that failure to integrate subcontractors, suppliers and consultants into collaborative arrangements remains a major shortcoming. Main contractor and subcontractor relationships therefore continue to be typified by such problems as late payments, charging fees to tender for work, award of contracts based on cheapest price rather than best value, negative margins and demand of retrospective discounts and cash rebates; all of which negatively impact on trust. Some main contractor organisations however, continue to embed supply chain management practices as a strategy for levering value from subcontractors. Such collaborative practices and their implications for inter-organisational trust development, and indeed overall project outcomes, have nonetheless received limited attention in construction management research, raising significant questions on the empirical basis for their implementation. This research was thus undertaken to investigate strategic supply chain management practices adopted by UK main contractors and its implications for inter-organisational trust development during projects. The study adopts a multiple case study design so as to unravel complex subtleties of inter-organisational trust development in the main contractors’ supply chain during projects. With four purposefully selected UK main contractor organisations that had implemented strategic supply chain management, data was gathered through a supply chain workshop, semi-structured interviews, passive observations and documentary analysis. From analysis of the data, it was revealed that strategic supply chain management practices of the main contractors were instrumental for trust manifestation across cognition, system and relational based dimensions. These practices served as constitutive elements of face-to-face interactions through which inter-organisational trust developed, whilst providing the institutional framework to which respective supply chain parties directed their psychological expectations. These findings highlight the importance of maintaining a core of subcontractors from which the main contractor can leverage long-term value irrespective of economic climate. This can be achieved by adequately prioritizing relationally trusted subcontractors for sensitive and high risk work packages whilst ensuring that strategic supply chain management principles can be used to engender impersonal (cognition and system-based) trust dimensions amongst other subcontractors used on a project. Accordingly, a supply chain management oriented framework for engendering inter-organisational trust during projects has been developed based on the study findings and evaluated through semi-structured interviews with selected target participants. This framework does not only provide a systematic and coherent approach for implementing or benchmarking strategic supply chain management in a main contractor’s organisation, but can also be used to prioritize and promote different trust dimensions and their associated behavioural consequences on projects, depending on perceived work package risks.

Since the introduction of sustainable development, industries have witnessed significant sustainability challenges. Literature shows that the food industry is concerned about its need for efficient and effective management practices in dealing with perishability and the requirements for conditioned storage and transport of food products that effect the environment. Hence, the environmental part of sustainability demonstrates its significance in this industrial sector. Despite this, there has been little research into environmentally sustainable inventory management of deteriorating items. This thesis presents mathematical modelling based research for production inventory systems in perishable food supply chains. In this study, multi-objective mixed-integer linear programming models are developed to determine economically and environmentally optimal production and inventory decisions for a two-echelon supply chain. The supply chain consists of single sourcing suppliers for raw materials and a producer who operates under a make-to-stock or make-to-order strategy. The demand facing the producer is non-stationary stochastic in nature and has requirements in terms of service level and the remaining shelf life of the marketed products. Using data from the literature, numerical examples are given in order to test and analyse these models. The computational experiments show that operational adjustments in cases where emission and cost parameters were not strongly correlated with supply chain collaboration (where suppliers and a producer operate under centralised control), emissions are effectively reduced without a significant increase in cost. The findings show that assigning a high disposal cost, limit or high weight of importance to perished goods leads to appropriate reduction of expected waste in the supply chain with no major cost increase. The research has made contributions to the literature on sustainable production and inventory management; providing formal models that can be used as an aid to understanding and as a tool for planning and improving sustainable production and inventory control in supply chains involving deteriorating items, in particular with perishable food supply chains.

Purpose of this paper: The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the factors that enable or aggravate the implementation of a GSCM strategy for textile and fashion companies. Moreover, it shall be investigated how textile and fashion companies perceive their incentives of implementing GSCM and what their organizational responses regarding the perceived barriers and enablers look like. Design/methodology/approach: The report combines a literature study on previous research in the field of supply chain management, Green Supply Chain Management and the drivers and barriers of implementing a GSCM strategy, with an empirical study consisting of an online survey, a semi-structured interview and two case studies that are based on literature review. In order to analyze the survey results, a method to calculate a company’s GSCM incentive score has been developed. Findings: The factors that have been identified as the strongest or most important ones by many companies of the survey, as well as the interviewee and the case studies are supplier collaboration, the lack of supplier commitment, customer demand for more sustainability, customer desire for lower prices and top management commitment. Some companies also perceived the alignment of their company’s strategy as strong GSCM enabler. However, the calculation shows that the overall incentive score of most participants is in the neutral level; meaning that they in total perceive neither significant incentives nor barriers to implement GSCM. With mostly internal enablers and external barriers, more than half of the survey participants can be categorized as Agenda Setters. Research limitations: Due to the low response rate, the sample size of this study is very small. Moreover, the results strongly depend on the personal opinion and experiences of the interviewee and the individual situations of the companies. This means that the results of this study give an indication, but are not generalizable. Therefore, another study with a different sampling method and a larger sample size is needed. Practical implications: The outcomes of this study show that GSCM concerns every aspect of a supply chain. A company that wants to engage in GSCM needs to have good relationships with and control over its suppliers in order to ensure that they fulfill the sustainability requirements, and deal with pressure from NGOs. Additionally, the company needs to balance customer demands for low prices and sustainability, expect some (one-time) investments and sacrifice short-term profit in order to ensure sustainable production. Originality/value: This report identifies the most important GSCM barriers and enablers for textile companies. By evaluating how companies within the textile and fashion sector perceive their incentives of implementing GSCM and investigating their organizational behavior towards barriers and enablers of GSCM, this study indicates what the current situation in the textile industry looks like; shows where improvements are necessary and gives insight for companies that aim to engage in green practices. The development of the so called GSCM incentive score; a method to calculate a company’s perceived incentives to implement a GSCM strategy, can be useful for future studies within this field.

The study has defined the position with regard to existing and evolving United Kingdom (UK) and European Union (EU) legislation, world trade agreements and institutions, global trade in chicken meat and market Quality Assurance (QA) standards in a series of peer-reviewed published papers and working papers. The development of global food supply chains can be a key driver in the harmonisation of international legislation, product and private assurance standards. Indeed compliance with legislation and retailer requirements has been a key market driver in the development of private assurance standards. The key objectives of the research were to examine current assurance schemes within the integrated poultry meat supply chain and the influence of regulation and external market drivers within the integrated poultry meat supply chain; develop and test a QA model for the poultry meat supply chain with a view to both baseline and higher level standards including the development of a business benchmarking system utilising a pre-requisite programme (PRP) and key performance indicators (KPI); and to assess the ability of the QA model to deliver regulatory and policy compliance whilst meeting varied business and market needs for an internationally traded product. This study has shown that a QA model is capable of providing a framework within which the poultry meat supply chain can operate. The legislative and performance requirements have been translated into quantifiable performance indicators which can be used to measure supply chain performance. This can assist differentiation of products at the point of consumption and give a quantifiable measure of the extrinsic value that has been added. This approach will therefore aid the communication of the benefits of differing methods of poultry meat production and afford the consumer the opportunity to make a more informed choice when purchasing meat products.

The relaxation of international boundaries has enabled the globalisation of markets making available an ever increasing number of specialised suppliers and markets. Inevitably this results in supply chains sharing suppliers and customers reflected in a network of relationships. Within this context firms buyers configure their supply relationships based on their perception of supply risk. Risk is managed by either increasing trust or commitment or by increasing the number of suppliers. Increasing trust and commitment facilitates collaboration and reduces the propensity for a supplier to exit the relationship. Conversely, increasing the number of suppliers reduces dependency and increases the ease of making alternative supply arrangements. The emergent network of relationships is dynamic and complex, and due in no small part to the influence of inventory management practices, tightly coupled. This critical organization of the network describes a system that contrary to existing supply chain conceptualisation exists far from equilibrium, requiring a different more appropriate theoretical lens through which to view them. This thesis adopts a Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) perspective to position supply networks as tightly coupled complex systems which according to Normal Accident Theory (NAT) are vulnerable to disruptions as a consequence of normal operations. The consequential boundless and emergent nature of supply networks makes them difficult to research using traditional empirical methods, instead this research builds a generalised supply network agent based computer model, allowing network constituents (agents) to take autonomous parallel action reflecting the true emergent nature of supply networks. This thesis uses the results from a series of carefully designed computer experiments to elucidate how supply networks respond to a variety of market structures and permitted agent behaviours. Market structures define the vertical (between tier) and horizontal (within tier) levels of price differentiation. Within each structure agents are permitted to autonomously modify their prices (constrained by market structure) and collaborate by sharing demand information. By examining how supply networks respond to different permitted agent behaviours in a range of market structures this thesis makes 4 contributions. Firstly, it extends NAT by incorporating the adaptive nature of supply network constituents. Secondly it extends supply chain management by specifying supply networks as dynamic not static phenomena. Thirdly it extends supply chain risk management through developing an understanding of the impact different permitted behaviour combinations on the networks vulnerability to disruptions in the context of normal operations. Finally by developing the understanding how normal operations impact a supply networks vulnerability to disruptions it informs the practice of supply chain risk management.

Background: The Supply Chain department at the division Sandvik Machining Solutions within Sandvik AB have found a need of introducing a process for managing innovation within the organization in order to gain competitive advantages and to stay on the leading edge in their field. Research Questions: 1. How can a generic model for managing innovation within the supply chain look like? 2. How can an innovation process be configured and managed in order to create and manage new ideas in the supply chain? Methodology: An exploratory case study approach to answer the research questions has been conducted in order to develop a model for innovation management within a supply chain of large manufacturing firm. The data collection methods have been interviews and from internal documentation. The interviews have been conducted with managers at Sandvik Machining Solutions within the SCM department, R&D department (innovation manager) and sales departments. The amount of correspondents has been no more than the amount 10 because of the empirical evidence it will result in otherwise and the time limit of this research. The fact that this is a case study, based on a single company, our findings will not be completely generalizable to other populations, but it can be generalizable to some extent if applied to similar companies and situations. To increase the validity of this research, the model could have been tested and evaluated. Findings and Results: The results showed that there is a need of becoming more innovative within the supply chain. Moreover, to get inputs through-out the organization we have also received significant information regarding e.g. the supply chain strategies, innovation and customer needs. These inputs have been analyzed in order to develop an innovation management process that will fit a supply chain department. The model also provides a structured approach to create and manage new ideas in within the Supply Chain.

This Master's Thesis deals with logistic processes within Unipetrol group of chemical companies with main focus on material flow of polyolefin plastics. Thesis's key objectives are thorough exploring of material flow, identifying possible ineffective areas and suggesting solutions. All parts of the material chain (production line, packaging,warehousing and expedition) are carefully analyzed. Theoretical part defines general logistics, importance of supply chain management in connection with globalization, chemical industry specifics and methods used in analyses (inventory management models). Practical part describes Unipetrol and its departments and more importantly results of executed analyses. Ten selected products with the greatest impact on department efficiency are examined carefully. Thesis conclusion includes final recommendations and chain's weakest places that should be eliminated.

<p>This study examines several emerging topics in supply chain management including the dynamic product substitution, the joint optimization of price and order quantity with demand ambiguity, and the implementation of the environmental and social responsibility (ESR) programs.</p>

O estudo consiste em analisar as diferenças do supply chain de moda entre as coleções tradicionais e o fast fashion, identificando os desafios e ações empreendidas pelas empresas têxteis que atuam no início da cadeia produtiva de moda. Tomando como base a literatura sobre as gestões da cadeia produtiva de moda e as mudanças ocorridas no mercado, identificou-se a contradição no tempo de aprovisionamento no que diz respeito às etapas de produção entre a moda tradicional e o fast fashion, termo em inglês, traduzido como moda rápida. As análises e comparações entre as gestões da cadeia produtiva de moda compreendem como esses dois sistemas atuam no mercado. Por um lado, existem as empresas de moda programada tradicional que pelo conceito e o tempo utilizado para o desenvolvimento de suas coleções funcionam como uma forma de imposição do consumo de seus produtos, já o modelo fast fashion pode ser interpretado como uma resposta do mercado consumidor. Com isso, a necessidade de diminuir o time to market para reduzir o risco exige encontrar soluções produtivas adequadas. A partir de uma revisão de literatura e de uma pesquisa exploratória, foi possível identificar como o setor têxtil, que atua no início da cadeia produtiva de moda, corresponde às diferenças de supply chain entre as coleções tradicionais e o fast fashion / This study consists on analyzing the supply chain differences between the traditional collections and the fast fashion, identifying the challenges and the undertaken actions by textile companies that act in the beginning of fashion productive chain. Taking as a base the literature on fashion productive chain management and the market changes, the contradiction on provision time was identified about the production levels between the traditional fashion and the fast fashion. The analysis and comparisons between fashion productive chain management comprehend on how theses both methods act on market. On the one hand there are the scheduled traditional fashion companies that through conception and the used time to develop their collection, it works as imposition consumption for their products, whereas the fast fashion way can be seen as the customer reply. Therewith, there is a need to reduce the time to market to decrease the risk new productive solutions must be found. From a literature review and a deep research, it was possible to identify how the textile sector, which operates at the beginning of the production chain fashion, corresponds to the supply chain differences between traditional collections and the fast fashion

In recent years the amount of newly registered electric vehicles, hybrid electric vehicles, and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles has increased rapidly in the Swedish market. These vehicles could be classified as battery-powered electric vehicles, and a majority carry a lithium-ion battery. The demand for lithium is expected to increase considerably, as a result of such a swift growth in battery-powered electric vehicles. Thus, if the recycling rate of lithium stays at a low level, demand could reach a scarcity-level by 2050. While neither any infrastructure nor an established process for recycling lithium-ion batteries currently exists in Sweden, this study aims to provide necessary input and verified tools for the design of a future reverse supply chain for discarded lithium-ion batteries in Sweden. The literature review of this study covers the subjects of reverse logistics, supply chain network design, and operations research. A thorough situation analysis of the Swedish market for battery-powered electric vehicles is conducted, and the composition, function, and characteristics of lithium-ion batteries are studied. The study finds that estimations of future demand of recyclable lithium-ion batteries in Sweden could be between 206 711 and 726 974 tons accumulated, based on actual and predicted sales numbers until 2030. Even if it is obvious that there are going to be large quantities of such batteries requiring recycling in the future, and even if some established processes exist, there is no defined supply chain for the collection of those batteries. Finally, a mixed-integer programming model for the design and development of a future reverse supply chain is presented. The model, characterized as a discrete multi-period facility location/allocation model, can with minor modifications be used for problems with fluctuating demand or when the demand is assumed to slowly progress until it has reached a steady state.