Practices for strategic capacity management in Malaysian manufacturing firms

While the notion of manufacturing capabilities is a long-standing notion in research on operations management, its actual implementation and management has been hardly researched. Five case studies in Malaysia offered the opportunity to examine the practice of manufacturing managers with regard to strategic capability management. The data collection and analysis was structured by using the notion of Strategic Capacity Management. Whereas traditionally literature has demonstrated the beneficial impact of an appropriate manufacturing strategy on the business strategy and performance, the study highlights the difficulty of managers to set the strategy, let alone implementing it. This is partly caused by the immense pressure of customers in these dominantly Make-To-Order environments for SMEs. Current concepts for manufacturing capabilities have insufficiently accounted this phenomenon and an outline of a research agenda is presented

Towards an Optimal Level of Information Systems Flexibility - A Conceptual Model

While insufficient flexibility of an information system to support a given business process precludes system use in certain cases, excessive flexibility can limit system usability (Silver 1991), in addition to presenting an unnecessary investment. Despite a wealth of research on flexibility and its impacts on organizations and business processes (esp. manufacturing), the value of flexibility and the price at which it comes have rarely been included into the analysis, with the result that guidelines to determine an appropriate (let alone optimal) level of flexibility of organizations, business processes or information systems have not been developed. To support decisions regarding information system flexibility, the current paper presents a conceptual model that determines the performance of a given business process during the lifetime of a supporting information system, with performance measured as costefficiency. The focus of the model is on the trade-off between investments in two types of flexibility: flexibility to use and flexibility to change an information system. After presenting the conceptual model, directions for further research are pointed out

Demand Management in the Smart Grid: An Information Processing Perspective

Driven by concerns regarding environmental sustainability, energy security, and economic growth, a fundamentaltransformation is taking hold in the electricity sector. Advanced communications technologies and information systems (IS)will play a central role in the realization of the ‘smart grid’, an intelligent and multi-directional electricity supply chain fromgeneration to end-user consumption. IS embedded in the smart grid will provide opportunities for improved businesspractices such as dynamic, near real-time demand management, allowing a better utilization of existing electricity supplycapacity and contributing to reductions in carbon emissions. Although opportunities exist, utilities face challenges adapting tothe smart grid environment. Drawing on information processing theory, this paper develops a model of how IS can improvethe effectiveness of electricity demand management. The model suggests practical implications for demand managementperformance of utilities and contributes to our understanding of the role information systems can play in achievingenvironmental sustainability

Competition in the advanced sale of service capacity

Pre-print of an article accepted for publication in International Journal of Revenue Management; authors' draft dated March 6, 2008; final version available at http://www.inderscience.com

Equilibrium analysis of capacity allocation with demand competition

This article examines the capacity allocation decisions in a supply chain in which a supplier sells a common product to two retailers at a fixed wholesale price. The retailers order the supplier's product subject to an allocation mechanism preannounced by the supplier, and compete for the customer demand. We perform an equilibrium analysis of the retailers' ordering decisions under uniform and individually responsive allocations. Uniform allocation guarantees equilibrium orders, but is not necessarily truth inducing in the presence of demand competition. Further, we find that (1) neither the supplier nor either one of the retailers sees its profits necessarily increasing with the supplier's capacity, and the supplier may sell more with a lower capacity level, and (2) capacity allocation may not only affect the supply chain members' profits but also change the supply chain structure by driving a retailer out of the market. This article provides managerial insights on the capacity and ordering decisions for the supplier, the retailers, and the supply chain. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2012Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91147/1/21486_ftp.pd

Optimalisasi Sistem Alokasi dan Penjadwalan pada Rantai Pasokan dengan Menggunakan Metode Karush-Khun-Tucker (KKT)

This study was conducted to estimate the company's optimal profit by considering the product supply chain in a company that receives orders from several distributors. If all orders cannot be fulfilled by the available production capacity, the company will offer a solution in allocating capacity to distributors by considering scheduling costs and other constraints. The main work in estimating the company's profit is modeling the scheduling costs and constraints in the capacity allocation problem in the company. That is, the company makes order scheduling to minimize costs to achieve maximum profit by applying the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) method. Karush-Khun-Tucker can be used to find the optimal solution of the function formed from the allocation and scheduling problems whether linear or nonlinear. In the process, the KKT method basically involves the same steps as the Lagrange method to be able to calculate the critical point and find the optimum solution. It is suggested for further research to involve more varied variables with more interesting cases.Penelitian ini dilakukan untuk memperkirakan keuntungan optimal perusahaan dengan mempertimbangkan rantai pasokan produk pada suatu perusahaan yang menerima pesanan dari beberapa distributor. Jika semua pesanan tidak bisa dipenuhi oleh kapasitas produksi yang tersedia, maka perusahaan akan menawarkan solusi dalam mengalokasikan kapasitas terhadap distributor dengan mempertimbangkan biaya penjadwalan dan kendala lainnya. Pekerjaan utama dalam memperkirakan keuntungan perusahaan adalah memodelkan biaya penjadwalan dan kendala dalam masalah alokasi kapasitas pada perusahaan. Artinya, perusahaan membuat penjadwalan pesanan untuk meminimalkan biaya untuk mencapai keuntungan maksimal dengan menerapkan metode Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT). Karush-Khun-Tucker dapat digunakan untuk menemukan solusi optimal dari fungsi yang terbentuk dari masalah alokasi dan penjadwalan apakah linier atau nonlinier. Dalam pengerjaannya metode KKT pada dasarnya melibatkan langkah-langkah yang sama seperti metode Lagrange untuk dapat menghitung titik kritis dan menemukan solusi optimum. Disarankan untuk penelitian selanjutnya dapat melibatkan variabel yang lebih variatif dengan kasus yang lebih menarik

An ontology-based model management architecture for service innovation

Organizations have indicated renewed interest in service innovation, design and management, given the growth of service sector. Decision support systems (DSS) play an important role in supporting this endeavor, through management of organizational resources such as data and models. Given the global nature of service value chains, there have been ever increasing demands on managing, sharing, and reusing these heterogeneous and distributed resources, both within and across organizational boundaries, through DSS consisting of database management systems (DBMS) and model management systems (MMS). Analogous to DBMS, model management systems focus on the management of decision models, dealing with representation, storage, and retrieval of models as well as a variety of applications such as analysis, reuse, sharing, and composition of models. Recent developments in the areas of semantic web and ontologies have provided a rich tool set for computational reasoning about these resources in an intelligent manner. In this chapter, we leverage these advances and apply service-oriented design principles to propose an ontology-based model management architecture supporting service innovation. The architecture is illustrated with case study scenarios and current state of implementation. The role of potential information technologies in supporting the architecture is also discussed. We then provide a roadmap to make advancements in research in this direction

Allocation with demand competition: Uniform, proportional, and lexicographic mechanisms

We examine capacity allocation mechanisms in a supply chain comprising a monopolistic supplier and two competing retailers with asymmetric market powers. The supplier allocates limited capacity to retailers according to uniform, proportional, or lexicographic mechanism. We study the impact of these allocation mechanisms on supplier pricing decisions and retailer ordering behavior. With individual order size no greater than supplier capacity, we show that all three mechanisms guarantee equilibrium ordering. We provide precise structures of retailer ordering decisions in Nash and dominant equilibria. Further, we compare the mechanisms from the perspective of the supplier, the retailers, and the supply chain. We show that regardless of whether retailer market powers are symmetric, lexicographic allocation with any priority sequence of retailers is better than the other two mechanisms for the supplier. Further, under lexicographic allocation, the supplier gains more profit by granting higher priority to the retailer with greater market power. We also extend our study to the case with multiple retailers. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 64: 85–107, 2017Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/137514/1/nav21734.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/137514/2/nav21734_am.pd

Designing a supply network for a startup company

Thesis (M. Eng. in Logistics)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2010.Cataloged from student submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 86-88).Our thesis introduces a supply chain framework catered for startup companies. Startup companies face unique circumstances such as constraints on financial and human resources, and greater uncertainty in demand. From our work with XL Hybrids, a startup company that hybridizes aftermarket vehicles, as well as interviews and literature review, we have attempted to distill supply chain strategies that can be applied to startup companies. To plan XL Hybrids' supply chain, we developed models for the following aspects of their supply chain: production scheduling, capacity planning, inventory policy, and component distribution. By running different demand and pricing scenarios, we gained an understanding of the impact of these variables on the four aspects of XL Hybrid's supply chain. Based on the scenario analysis and supply chain framework that we developed, we recommend that XL Hybrids be conservative with capacity expansion while strategically sourcing key components after considering volume discounts and different distribution methods.by Marcus S. Causton and Jianmin Wu.M.Eng.in Logistic