Purpose: This work systematically reviews the extant academic management literature on supply networks. It specifically examines how network configurations and network governance mechanisms influence each other in supply networks. Design: 125 analytical and empirical studies were identified using an evidence-based approach to review the literature mainly published between 1985 and 2012. Synthesis: Drawing on a multi-disciplinary theoretical foundation, this work develops an integrative framework to identify three distinct yet interdependent themes that characterize the study of supply networks: a) Network Configurations (structures and relationships); b) Network Governance Mechanisms (formal and informal); and c) The Interplay between Network Configurations and Network Governance Mechanisms. Findings: Network configurations and network governance mechanisms mutually influence each other and cannot be considered in isolation. Formal and informal governance mechanisms provide better control when used as complements rather than as substitutes. The choice of governance mechanism depends on the nature of exchange; role of management; desired level of control; level of flexibility in formal contracts; and complementary role of formal and informal governance mechanism. Research implications: This nascent field has thematic and methodological research opportunities for academics. Comparative network analysis using longitudinal case studies offers a rich area for further study. Practical Implications: The complexity surrounding the conflicting roles of managers at the organisation and network levels poses a significant challenge during the development and implementation stage of strategic network policies. Originality/value: This review reveals that formal and informal governance mechanisms provide better control when used as complements rather than as substitutes.

Att ställa miljökrav inom leverantörskedjorna har blivit allt vanligare i takt med ökat miljöarbete. Det är dock bristfälligt dokumenterat hur väl eventuella miljökrav uppfylls kedjan igenom. För att organisera miljöarbetet har strategier uppkommit vilka tar hänsyn till kedjans miljöpåverkan, såsom Green Supply Chain Management (GSCM). Genom en fallstudie kartlades vilka miljökrav som ställdes, om kraven var konsekventa längs leverantörskedjan och hur kraven kunde relateras till företagens övriga miljöarbete. Fallstudien hade sin utgångspunkt i Liljeholmens Stearinfabriks AB med fokus på värmeljuskoppens leverantörskedja. Genom en semistrukturerad intervju har företagen inom kedjan svarat på frågor kring bl.a. miljökrav. Dessutom har en LCA gjorts på värmeljuskoppen för att se huruvida miljökraven var adekvata med tanke på produktens miljöpåverkan. Resultatet visade att företagen ställde miljörelaterade krav. Dessa krav berörde främst leverantörens allmänna miljöarbete snarare än själva produkten. Typen av ställda krav var ej konsekvent med företagens miljöarbete. LCAn visade på att produktens största miljöpåverkan härrör från aluminiumet. Miljökraven borde således inriktas på större andel återvunnet material.

In a world economy where globalization reaches almost every corner, the need for a company to attain flexibility has acquired tremendous importance to remain competitive and profitable. This Thesis would present the importance of flexibility in times of uncertain conditions (natural and socio-economic), it would present an analysis of the struggle of Toyota Motors Manufacturing Texas and one of its on-site suppliers Futaba Industrial Texas “FIT” to attain Manufacturing Flexibility through different economic crisis and a natural disaster presenting its strategies to mitigate economic losses and cope with the turbulent environment by developing robust systems. / text

This doctoral dissertation titled "Product Strategies in Supply Chains" consists of three essays. In this dissertation, I study firms' strategic decisions regarding design of products and product lines in different supply chain contexts. I focus on firms' strategic interactions with supply chain members, including consumers and suppliers, in dynamic environments. The first essay (Chapter 2) studies how the cost structure of and information asymmetry about an OEM's in-house option affect her choice of product design quality in a decentralized supply chain where the supplier specifies contract terms. The second essay (Chapter 3) examines the effect of product returns and their potential refurbishing on intertemporal product strategy and profit of a firm facing strategic consumers. We also examine the effect of product returns on the time inconsistency problem faced by the firm. The third essay (Chapter 4) investigates the impact of competition from a third-party remanufacturer on product strategy and profit of an OEM in the presence of strategic consumers. Motivated by general perception among practitioners and the extant literature showing the competition from third-party remanufacturers as undesirable for the OEM, we specifically examine whether competition from a third-party remanufacturer is always undesirable for the OEM.

<p>Firms' inventory or production decisions are influenced by a variety of factors, including both the selling price of the end products and the purchasing cost of raw materials. In most cases, there is a strong connection between purchasing costs and selling prices. In my dissertation, I study the impact of prices on a firm's inventory</p><p>decisions, particularly in systems with delivery lead time and environmental concerns. The findings are reported in three studies. The first study analyzes the joint inventory and pricing problem with lead time, which is known to be difficult to solve due to its computational complexity. We develop a simple heuristic to resolve</p><p>the computational issue and reveal the impact of lead time on the joint decisions. In the second study, we extend the heuristic approach in the previous study to systems with both positive lead time and fixed ordering costs. The effectiveness of the heuristic in both studies are verified through both theoretical bounds and numerical experiments. In the third study, we examine the effect of the procurement cost and its volatility on a firm's profit. This allows us to study under what conditions a firm can profitably operate an eco-friendly supply chain. Our study also helps the firms to understand what type of products would better absorb the higher costs associated with an eco-friendly production system.</p> / Dissertation

In this thesis, we study a multi-period, multi-product, production planning problem for the lumber industry, and present a hierarchical approach to control and schedule lumber production in a sawmill. First, at the sawing unit, the lower level of the hierarchical structure, the combination of log classes, price lists and sawing patterns defines the expected output distribution in terms of lumber pieces. A price list, defining the value of outputs, is fed directly to the sawmill production control optimizer to select the best sawing patterns. This results in a broad variety of different lumber outputs. Second, at the upper level, a mixed integer programming model has been proposed to maximize the total revenue at the sawmill. The lumber outputs determined at the lower level are used as data at the upper level. Market demand, lumber inventory cost, and supply cost are considered over the planning horizon. The proposed model has been developed and implemented on a real-scale prototype sawmill.

The purpose of this thesis is to point out how a company can gain a better process by using PM in an effective way. The report concludes that the existence in practice of theoretically important aspects are different, also that the most correct way of leading the aspects are through the creation of a PM process. During this thesis work the benefits with performance measurements have been analyzed. Since the genesis of the industrialisation there have been growing needs to identify ways of understanding how a company functions. One of the main events historically leading to the broad adoption of PM was the introduction of the DuPont model. The DuPont model developed by DuPont and General Motors during the beginning of the 20th century quickly became the industry standard in the US for financial analysis. The Dupont model gave PM a central role in evaluating the performance of a company. Companies are today driven towards a higher level of responsiveness and flexibility in order to remain competitive. In order to measure the advancement towards these objectives, an increasingly complex set of activities collection of PM to monitor performance satisfactorily. Often however, PM are still developed around traditional, functional metrics focusing on departmental issues, rather than on the whole value stream. There has also been analyzed how a manufacturing company can use PM in an effective way. Under this thesis it emerged that the most crucial factor affecting the companies PM was that it was hard to understand how to use it correctly. When a company use it correctly it determines where the company stands, if they want to be competitive in the future and a method to maintain a good value stream flow. The economical factors for the company are at least important because all decisions always include costly investments. At the same time a company’s PM must be as efficient as possible and generate a good investment. Also other factors have been presented in this thesis but do not affect the effectiveness of the PM. The most important factors found to a more effective PM were; does the PM fulfil its purpose, is the performance attained, to make the purpose explicit and at last boost the education around the subject. The whole research has been carried out over a twenty-week period, during that period data collection has been performed via case studies. The rest of the data collection has been collected through a literature review by examining relevant data to answer the two research questions. This thesis have led to a better understanding regarding how to use PM and the benefits of it. This are based on the collected data from the case studies and from the theoretical findings, the empirical data were analyzed in a way that the company understood what was wrong with today´s PM.

The purpose of this dissertation is to provide an effective approach to design the supply chain (SC) of the cellulosic biofuel industry in order that it will support and accelerate the successful commercialization of the cellulosic biofuel industry. The methods of approach to this problem are (1) to assess the state-of-the-art biofuel SC studies, (2) to provide a decision support tool based on a mixed integer programming (MIP) model for the cellulosic biofuel supply chain design problem (BSCP), (3) to devise an exact solution method to solve large-scale instances of BSCP, (4) to evaluate a biomass logistics system based on biomass modules, by using new simulation elements for new machines, and (5) to compare several biomass logistics systems based on biomass module, bale, and silage, using simulation models. The first part of this dissertation broadly reviews the literature on biofuel SCs, analyzing the state-of-the-art biofuel and petroleum-based fuel SC studies as well as relating generic SC models that have been published over the last decade to the biofuel SC (An et al., 2010a). The resulting analysis proposes fertile opportunity for future research to contribute to improving biofuel SC. The second part of this dissertation formulates BSCP as a MIP model, which is a time-staged, multi-commodity flow, network design problem with an objective of maximizing profit (An et al., 2010b). The model prescribes strategic level decisions (i.e., facility locations, capacities, and technology types) as well as plans for transportation routes and material flows (i.e., quantities produced, stored, and transported) in each time period. A case study demonstrates managerial use in application to a region in Central Texas. The third part of this dissertation provides an exact solution method to solve BSCP. An embedded structure can be transformed to a generalized minimum cost flow problem, which is used as a sub-problem in a CG approach. This study proposes a dynamic programming algorithm to solve the sub-problem in O(m), generating improving path-flows. To accelerate branch-and-bound (B&B) search, it develops an inequality, called the partial objective constraint (POC), which is based on the portion of the objective function associated with binary variables. The fourth part of this dissertation evaluates a biomass module system, which is a conceptual logistics system based on large packages of chopped biomass with sufficient size and density to provide maximized legal highway loads and quick load/unload times. The last part of this dissertation evaluates economic benefits of the biomass module system, comparing it to bale and silage systems.

Supply Chain Management (SCM) is becoming increasingly important in the modern business world. In order to effectively manage and integrate a supply chain (SC), a deep understanding of overall SC operation dynamics is needed. This involves understanding how the decisions, actions and interactions between SC members affect each other, and how these relate to SC performance and SC disruptions. Achieving such an understanding is not an easy task, given the complex and dynamic nature of supply chains. Existing simulation approaches do not provide an explanation of simulation results, while related work on SC disruption analysis studies SC disruptions separately from SC operation and performance. This thesis presents a logic-based approach for modelling, simulating and explaining SC operation that fills these gaps. SC members are modelled as logicbased intelligent agents consisting of a reasoning layer, represented through business rules, a process layer, represented through business processes and a communication layer, represented through communicative actions. The SC operation model is declaratively formalised, and a rule-based specification is provided for the execution semantics of the formal model, thus driving the simulation of SC operation. The choice of a logic-based approach enables the automated generation of explanations about simulated behaviours. SC disruptions are included in the SC operation model, and a causal model is defined, capturing relationships between different types of SC disruptions and low SC performance. This way, explanations can be generated on causal relationships between occurred SC disruptions and low SC performance. This approach was analytically and empirically evaluated with the participation of SCM and business experts. The results indicate the following: Firstly, the approach is useful, as it allows for higher efficiency, correctness and certainty about explanations of SC operation compared to the case of no automated explanation support. Secondly, it improves the understanding of the domain for non-SCM experts with respect to their correctness and efficiency; the correctness improvement is significantly higher compared to the case of no prior explanation system use, without loss of efficiency. Thirdly, the logic-based approach allows for maintainability and reusability with respect to the specification of SC operation input models, the developed simulation system and the developed explanation system.

There is an increasing importance of sustainability in the development of companies' business strategies. Due to its impact on the environment, this is particularly essential for companies of the transport and logistics sector. The paper explores several factors that influence the environmental behaviour of transport and logistics companies in Austria. It discusses the importance of the economic impact on environmental management decision in detail and analyses the sector's specific characteristics in terms of environmental behaviour. A case-based approach involving multiple field studies with face-to-face expert interviews and secondary data analysis was used to evaluate environmental performance and specific practices. Due to various factors like a lack of end-user contact and high levels of competition, the transport and logistics sector does not show much environmentally friendly behaviour. We can confirm that the economic factor is crucial for companies' decisions on the implementation of environmental practices. Using selected cases, we will demonstrate how environmental measures contribute to overall business performance. Furthermore, suggestions are given as to how the government can further support transport and logistics companies in this regard. Because there is little evidence of tangible environmental practices in the sector of transport and logistics and their impact on the business performance, this study is both exploratory and explanatory in its nature. (authors' abstract)