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Evaluating The Value of Logistics Postponement Strategy via Real Options

ABSTRACT
Postponement strategies offer opportunities for firms to achieve effective supply chain management. Postponement strategies could be classified into manufacturing postponement which delays the product differentiation and logistics postponement which delays the distributing process to the confirmed customer orders. In practice, the way to implement manufacturing postponement is more complicated than logistics postponement¡¦s. By employing the logistics postponement strategy, all the firms have to consider is the distribution of finalized products from a centralized inventory to final retailers. Comparing with integrating all the manufacturing activities, logistics postponement strategy could be an effective one for firms to handle the demand uncertainty over the regional markets.
By employing the logistics postponement strategy, firms could decrease the cost of inventory and backorder through delaying products distribution to the confirmed customer orders. The connection between real options and postponement is also showed on this point. By employing the real options, decisions could be made when the firms wait and get more information about the market. The value the firms wait to get is also the benefits that logistics postponement strategy could reach by logistics postponement. Thus, the flexibility to decrease the inventory and backorder cost is considered as the management flexibility that real options could evaluate.
On the other way, it¡¦s not always free for firms to get such a flexible management ability. The capital that firms have to invest for any change of the supply chain becoming the flexible one could be equal to buying the exercise right in real options. We therefore could construct a model to evaluate the value of logistics postponement strategy via real options and help the firms to judge what would be the proper occasions for logistics postponement to be implemented.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0625105-142528
Date25 June 2005
CreatorsHuang, Kai-ying
ContributorsIuan-yuan Lu, Tsuang Kuo, Hueimei Liang
PublisherNSYSU
Source SetsNSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive
LanguageCholon
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0625105-142528
Rightscampus_withheld, Copyright information available at source archive

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