Supply Chain Management and Logistics: Innovative Strategies and Practical Solutions PDF by Zhe Liang, Wanpracha Art Chaovalitwongse, Leyuan Shi

Contents

Preface
As the world moves toward more competitive and open markets in the twenty-first century, effective supply chain management is of critical importance to the success of an enterprise. Despite a large amount of research conducted in the past decades on the supply chain management topic, many researchers and practitioners are still devoting considerable efforts to the new emerging problems. This is not only due to theoretical and computational challenges, but also the business environments and configurations from various industries, which are continuously changing and becoming more restrictive and demanding. As a result, numerous new problems are arising in the field of supply chain management.

In response to the need for educational and research resources that practically apply to a collaborative and integrative environment in today’s market, this book contains contributions from leading experts in supply chain management throughout the world. It is intended as a collection of innovative strategies and practical solutions that address problems encountered by enterprises in the management of supply chain and logistics. As supply chain management is a far-reaching area, it is not possible to cover all aspects and applications of the field. Rather than concentrating on just methodology or techniques (such as optimization or simulation) or specific application areas (such as inventory or transportation), the book is designed to present readers with a collection of topics that bridge the gap between the academic arena and industrial practice. Yet the book still provides an in-depth discussion of both general techniques and specific approaches to a broad range of important, inspiring, and unsolved questions in the field.

This book is designed to be of value to researchers, practitioners, and professionals in academic institutions and industry who need a wide-spectrum resource for many different aspects involved in supply chain management from technical methodologies to management implications. Graduate (and advanced undergraduate) students and researchers will also find this book a rich resource for the design, analysis, and implementation of supply chain management problems arising in a wide range of industries.

The book is organized based on four major research themes in supply chain management: (1) supply chain strategy and coordination, (2) supply chain network optimization, (3) inventory management in the supply chain, and (4) financial decisions in the supply chain. The sequence of these themes helps in transitions from an enterprise-wide framework to network design to operational management to financial aspects of supply chain. Each individual theme also addresses the answer to a challenging question as to how to go about applying quantitative tools to real-life operations, resulting in practical solutions.

The first section includes two chapters focused on supply chain strategy and coordination. Chapter 1, by Miller, lays down the platform of this book by providing an overview of the concept of hierarchical supply chain planning frameworks at the strategic level down through operations. Although the chapter does not review the details of key operations and decision support tools in the frameworks, it provides a key foundational tool to organizeand manage supply chain planning and operations activities. Chapter 2, by Pei et al., provides an overview of coordination between supply chain partners in discrete manufacturing enterprises. The chapter provides an overview of challenging scheduling problems that often arise in supply chain coordination and briefly discusses research methodologies that are applied to these problems.

The second section includes three chapters with emphasis on optimization methodologies in supply chain networks. Chapter 3, by Lei et al., provides an overview of optimization models and solution methodologies for integrated operations planning problems in supply chain networks. These ideas can be applied to integrated real-life problems that involve production, inventory, distribution, and routing. Chapter 4, by Nurre et al., presents a review of the nested partitions method for solving large-scale optimization problems. The applications of the method are demonstrated on two supply chain network optimization problems. Specifically, the intermodal hub location problem, which is a facility location problem in supply chain networks, and the multilevel capacitated lot-sizing problem with backlogging, which is a complex production planning problem, are the two case problems in the chapter. Chapter 5, by Chen and Shi, considers a novel stochastic optimization model of the location problem to place critical components in a supply chain network to increase the resiliency of the network, that is, to aid in the recovery of the supply chain network after an extreme event. The chapter discusses a case study to determine the placement of permanent generators at the retail locations of shops, which distributes both convenience items and fuel in Upstate New York and Vermont.

The third section includes two chapters that are centered on inventory decisions in the supply chain. Chapter 6, by Liang et al., proposes a novel optimization model based on a schedule-based formulation for the cyclic inventory routing problem. The chapter presents a column generation method as a solution methodology to solve this problem efficiently. Chapter 7, by Chaovalitwongse et al., illustrates a production planning case study in a production process of rolled tissues. In the case study, customer demand could not be fulfilled because of an insufficient inventory level. The chapter addresses the problem by introducing a new inventory policy and a production planning method to determine new production orders.

The fourth section includes two chapters that are focused on financial aspects in the supply chain. Chapter 8, by Yang et al., discusses the importance of competitive learning when firms make decisions on initial investments. For example, when firms neglect the due diligence on conducting demand-forecast studies, overcapacity will be inevitable. The last chapter, by Qin et al., studies a revenue management optimization for a multiperiod multiclass rail passenger revenue management problem. The chapter presents a complex optimization model and proposes a new efficient solution methodology. This work has an impact on logistics network and transportation problems.

During the process of completing this volume, we spent a few years interacting with the authors and anonymous reviewers. We appreciate their time, effort, and dedication toward the successful completion of this volume and cannot thank them enough. The experience of putting together this volume has been rewarding. We truly hope that readers will find the volume to be as stimulating and valuable as we did.