Inefficient supply chains result in unsold inventory and unfilled customer orders, posing a significant risk to company profitability and consumer satisfaction. The purpose of this single case study was to explore strategies supply chain managers in the manufacturing industry used to match the level of unsold inventory in the supply chain with customer demand consistently. Porter's value chain provided the conceptual framework for the study. A sample of 5 experienced supply chain managers from a global manufacturing company headquartered in the midwestern United States participated in semistructured interviews. Each participant provided company supply chain documentation for triangulation. Data analysis followed Yin's 5 stages of data analysis and yielded 4 themes: define policies and processes, develop collaborative partnerships, leverage technology, and consider the end-to-end supply chain. The themes are the foundation of successful supply chain management strategies that have improved matching of unsold inventory in the supply chain to customer demand. Study findings benefit both supply chain leaders and consumers by providing the potential to improve consistency in meeting customer demand with less inventory in the supply chain, resulting in customer satisfaction, business growth, and stable employment. The findings may contribute to positive social change by helping supply chain leaders create thriving businesses with satisfied employees and customers who are willing to spend their time and money contributing to community growth, economic stability, and enhanced social conditions.

Indirect procurement is becoming one of the most challenging function in food processing organizations, which need strategies to enhance supply chain sustainability. Food processing organizations could expect more than 50% maverick indirect costs out of the 80% procurement cost from total annual costs. The focus of the research question was on strategies procurement managers responsible for food processing indirect procurement could use to enhance supply chain sustainability. The conceptual framework for this study was resource dependency theory, and the purpose of this multiple case study was to explore strategies some procurement managers responsible for food processing indirect procurement could use to enhance supply chain sustainability. Face-to-face semistructured interviews were used from 2 procurement managers from food processing organizations in Nairobi, Kenya, who were recorded and gave responses to 9 interview questions. Data were transcribed, coded, and analyzed into themes. Data were triangulated and then subjected to member checking to ensure reliability and strengthen credibility of collected data. The data revealed 2 major themes, which included, indirect procurement strategies, and resource availability. The identification of indirect procurement strategies was important because participants believed stakeholder partnering and collaboration in formulating procurement strategies could enhance value for money in indirect procurement. The resource availability was important to enhance supply chain sustainability. Implications for social change include cost reduction in the supply chain, increasing organization profits, lower products costs, which could improve economic, and social benefit.

To effectively analyze and design a flexible supply chain (FSC), a variety of variables need to be considered. This research presents a framework, an extension of Chan et al. (2009) that identifies a more extensive yet salient set of variables for designing FSCs. This framework provides a basis for using simulation to better understand, and to better design, FSCs. Conceptual simulation models are developed to represent general flexible supply chains in terms of using design and system variables. The proposed conceptual model incorporates many elements from the framework considering a wide variety of variables to demonstrate the approach for building a FSC model. This research provides a general FSC simulation model, built in FlexSim, that implements many variables from the framework and aspects of the conceptual framework. Variability plays an important role in FSC model. Two key supply-chain performance measures are lead time and variability in lead time. One way that has been proposed to improve both measures is to increase supplier flexibility. Through simulation this research provides a means to assess the effects of various manufacturing and logistics flexibility-related variables on lead time and its variability. This research includes effect of several experiments that consider the effect of supplier flexibility level, proportion of process time that is production and transportation time, and level of variability in process time on lead time. The triangular distribution is used often in simulation when process data are not available. Thus, the triangular distribution is used in the FSC simulation model. This research provides a means to effectively consider alternative values of the parameters of the triangular distribution during experimentation. The method facilitates specification of both moment and location parameters.

This research considers a single-item two-echelon supply chain facing a sequence of stochastic bulky customer demand with random order inter-arrival time and random demand size. The demand process is a general renewal process and the cost functions for both parties involve the renewal function and its integral. The complexity of the general renewal function causes the computational intractability in deciding the optimal order quantities, so approximations for the renewal function and its integral are introduced to address the computational complexity. Asymptotic expansions are commonly used in the literature to approximate the renewal function and its integral when the optimal decisions are relatively large compared to the mean of the inter-renewal time. However, the optimal policies do not necessarily fall in the asymptotic region. So the use of asymptotic expansions to approximate the renewal function and its integral in the cost functions may cause significant errors in decision making. To overcome the inaccuracy of the asymptotic approximation, this research proposes a modified approximation. The proposed approximation provides closed form functions for the renewal function and its integral which could be applied to various optimization problems such as inventory planning, supply chain management, reliability and maintenance. The proposed approximations are tested with commonly used distributions and applied to an application in the literature, yielding good performance. By applying the proposed approximation method to the supply chain cost functions, this research obtains the optimal policies for the decentralized and the centralized cases. The numerical results provide insights into the cost savings realized by the centralization of the supply chain compared to the decentralized case. Furthermore, this research investigates coordination schemes for the decentralized case to improve the utilities of parties. A cost sharing mechanism in which the vendor offers the retailer a contract as a compensation of implementing vendordesired inventory policy is investigated. The sharing could be realized by bearing part of the retailer’s inventory holding cost or fixed cost. The contract is designed to minimize the vendors cost while satisfying the individual rationality of the retailer. Other forms of coordination mechanisms, such as the side payment and delayed payment, are also discussed.

The North American forest products industry is primarily commodity-based and faces challenges. This has led to the proposal of a shift toward revenue diversification through the production of high-value specialty products along with the conventional commodity products. A key consideration for this new business strategy to remain competitive and sustainable is that the forest products supply chain designs must perform satisfactorily under the dynamic market conditions. The notion of supply chain operability attempts to characterize the ability of a supply chain to perform satisfactorily in the face of uncertainty. However, limited quantitative analysis is available in the current body of literature. In this work, the concepts originated within the context of process systems engineering are adapted to develop optimization-based frameworks in order to characterize supply chain operability measures, in particular, supply chain flexibility and dynamic responsiveness. Although motivated by the forest products industry, the practical mathematical formulations presented are widely applicable to general process supply chains in other industries. This thesis aims to extend the supply chain flexibility analysis formulation established by Mastragostino (2012) to include additional quantitative flexibility measures. The resulting framework provides a quantitative mapping to various types of flexibility frequently discussed in the operations research literature. Two case studies are included to illustrate the application of this framework for analyzing the flexibility of existing supply chain processes, as well as utilizing it in supply chain design. The work also builds on the analysis framework established by Mastragostino and Swartz (2014) to assess supply chain responsiveness, and to configure the framework in preparation for tackling design problems under uncertainty. Then a composite operability analysis framework is proposed to address both flexibility and responsiveness metrics simultaneously in forest products supply chain design and operation. A comprehensive case study based on a forest product company is performed and the trade-offs among flexibility, responsiveness and economics are examined. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

Plantilla para elaborar Trabajo de investigación de Maestría en Supply Chain Management para optar el grado académico de Maestro en Supply Chain Management en el Programa de Maestría en Supply Chain Management. Escuela de Postgrado. Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas.

South Africa has complex environmental and economic challenges as part of its sustainable development. These include depleting natural resources, significant waste generation and high carbon emissions, compounded with an economic growth rate below global growth. Organisations within the supply chain play a key role in purchasing and distributing goods that underpin the economy. Waste generation and carbon emissions drive climate change which has been singled out as a significant risk to humanity. The negative environmental impacts of climate change, resource depletion, waste generation and carbon emissions have compounded the bleak economic outlook for South Africa. Developed countries have implemented circular economy policies that support green innovation within the supply chain. The circular economy is a model that supports waste reduction while improving the economy and the use of natural resources through reducing, reusing and recycling at a basic level. The research area of circular economy in the supply chain is trending globally and is still relatively new from a South African context, particularly around circular business models in the supply chain. Circular economy principles work hand in hand with driving green innovation, as the technology allows for the identification of new ways to reduce waste and cost across the supply chain. The research is qualitative and exploratory within the area of supply chain, with a focus on green innovation and circular economy from a developing country perspective. It intends to understand the key drivers that contribute to companies adopting green innovation strategies. The benefit of the research is for practitioners to understand how South Africa can achieve green in the supply chain and overcome economic issues by adopting circular economy principles. Twelve semi-structured interviews were carried out with managers of large organisations that have embarked on green initiatives within the supply chain. The study established commonalities with existing research on external and internal drivers supporting green innovation and the circular economy in the supply chain. The research established new insights around South African organisations' differences in the supply chain, particularly around operational risk being a critical driver considering water scarcity and electricity instability. It also identified internal drivers to changing business models from linear to circular, particularly around sustainability strategies, network collaboration, sustainability culture and changing the way companies are measured. Recommendations support how business models could be adapted to drive circular business models across supply chain organisations in South Africa. / Mini Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2021. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / MBA / Unrestricted

Services and service-based business are a major part of any economy. However, service-based supply chains require a greater level of interaction between provider and consumer than the traditional manufacturing or product-based supply chain. Therefore, they require optimization and resiliency models that acknowledge the constraints and goals unique to service-based industries. Value co-creation and service-dominant logistics (SDL) are relatively new to operations research. Existing literature in management science provides a framework for value co-creation but does not provide a model for optimizing value cocreation and resiliency in a complex or dynamic systems such as education supply chains (ESC). This dissertation addresses these knowledge gaps through 3 essays. The first essay establishes a method for optimizing investment in resiliency measures when utilizing parallel supply chains. The essay examines the intersection of value co-creation theory between higher education and service-dominant logistics (SDL) to understand the role of supply chain elements in value cocreation. The second essay provides a theoretical approach to incorporating resilience planning into the customer relationship management model. The final essay establishes a method for optimizing investment in resiliency measures when utilizing parallel service supply chains.

This thesis deals with the problems of design and operation of process supply chains. Process supply chains face many challenges due to volatile market conditions, production and transportation delays, and stiff market competition, which ultimately affect their profitability. Supply chain management (SCM) is the process of managing the flow of materials and information within supply chain to optimize the SC performance. SCM is carried out using a hierarchical decision-making framework, where the top most layer looks at network design and the bottom-most layer deals with scheduling day-to-day activities. In this research, the systems engineering principles are applied to devise an improved methodology for supply chain optimization (SCO). First, we consider the design of supply chain in the presence of demand uncertainty. The representation of network topology plays an important role in deriving the optimal network design. In real practice, the shipping cost for transferring goods from one location to another is determined based on service time and quantity. More importantly, the cost associated with establishing a transportation linkage is relatively small for existing transportation infrastructure and can be changed if beneficial. The flexibility of changing the transportation routes is included in the network topology representation by the explicit inclusion of time limited transportation contract agreements. Further, the customer demand is volatile, and it is very difficult to predict accurately. To handle the demand uncertainty, a two-stage stochastic programming formulation is applied in the SC design approach. Next, we consider the problem of handling uncertainty in SC planning by applying a system engineering control principle, robust model predictive control (MPC). The uncertainty in model parameters (yield) and demand are captured by stochastic programming. In this approach, the planning activities are represented by a hybrid model with decisions governed by logical conditions/rulesets. An MPC based rolling horizon control framework is used to schedule the planning activities, where the SC performance is expressed using a multi-criterion objective comprising customer service and economics. The uncertainty in demand and yield are propagated by two mechanisms - an open-loop approach, and an approximate closed-loop strategy. Finally, we consider the problem of integration of SC planning and scheduling. Due to the use of different time scale models for planning and scheduling, the decision derived from the planning layer may result in infeasibility when those targets are implemented at the scheduling level, which ultimately affects the supply chain efficiency. To address this issue, we model tactical and operational planning activities using an integrated hybrid time modeling approach in which the first few planning periods are formulated using an operational planning model and the remaining time periods are modeled with a tactical planning model. The main rationale for formulating an integrated model is that customer demand forecast becomes less accurate for a future time, therefore making a detailed planning model unnecessary. A key benefit of using a hybrid modeling approach is that it avoids the problem of infeasibility encountered in the hierarchical decision framework, as well as the computational burden associated with the use of a detailed planning model over a long time horizon. We employ an MPC based rolling horizon framework as a tactical decision policy where the integrated model is used to predict the system behavior. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Extant research on technology adoption provides limited insights into the extent of technology penetration into an organization's work routines, especially in collaborative efforts across supply chains. Further research is required to delve into the broader scope of permanent technology-based solutions that effectively tackle specific issues within the supply chain. This dissertation examines blockchain through three essays to fill these research gaps and contributes to blockchain-based supply chain collaboration and performance literature. Essay 1 examines supply chain behavioral drivers of blockchain assimilation by grounding the hypotheses on social network theory. Findings indicate that supply chain learning, collaboration, and network prominence will affect blockchain assimilation through a cross-sectional survey of supply chain professionals familiar with blockchain. It provides psychometrically validated scales for blockchain assimilation and network prominence, adding to the blockchain literature. Essay 2 builds on institutional theory to argue that peripheral organizations in the blockchain-based network will succumb to institutional pressures and that blockchain principles will require them to play crucial roles in supply chain collaboration efforts to gain legitimacy. By adopting a multi-method approach of a vignette-based experiment and a survey, the findings help supply chain collaboration practitioners manage institutional pressures across emerging blockchain-based systems, particularly for organizations in the early stages of blockchain implementation. Furthermore, the second essay focuses on the structural positions within a blockchain-based business-to-business network. It proposes a novel scale based on network theory to assess the organizational blockchain network periphery. Essay 3 argues that supply chain organizations that adopt blockchain as a set of ordinary capabilities and develop the dynamic capability of integrated supply chain flow will benefit from blockchain potential in managing its archetypal supply chain pain points. Grounding hypotheses in supply chain practice view and dynamic capability theories, the findings indicate that blockchain capabilities partially mediate supply chain pain management through supply chain flow integration based on a cross-sectional survey of supply chain managers familiar with blockchain. Essay three has two crucial practitioner implications. First, the newly developed and validated scales can help develop standardized and comprehensive blockchain performance metrics that cover technical capabilities and supply chain practices for empowered supply chain performance. Second, the one-on-one mapping of blockchain capabilities with supply chain pain points can help blockchain developers provide customer-centric supply chain solutions.