Providing a lean and agile supply chain model in project-based organizations

Purpose: One of the differences between project-oriented and routine organizations is the difference in their supply chain. This leads to the use of distinct and new approaches to its management. In this article, according to the existing problems, a conceptual model of lean and agile supply chain in project-oriented organizations is presented by examining the lean functions and agility of supply chain discussion. Research methodology: This research is descriptive-analytical in terms of method and applied in terms of purpose. This study's statistical population includes all managers and supply chain experts of project-based organizations and the statistical sample includes 105 people who have been selected using a purposive sampling method. After presenting the conceptual model, a researcher-made questionnaire was used to collect information and to examine the intended model, the structural equation approach with PLS software was used. Results: The research findings indicate that the 114 identified items for the research model significantly explain their related components. The results of the model fit study showed that based on the convergent validity indices, Cronbach's alpha and Cronbach's alpha, and the subscription validity index and the exponential or redundancy validity index, the model is in the desired condition. Limitation: This research only described Knowledge Based Centre. Contribution: Organizations realised that relying on existing knowledge alone was not enough to compete in a competitive environment, and went beyond the boundaries of their organization to acquire knowledge. Organizations considered customers as a very useful and knowledgeable resource, and activities should be done to interact with customers in leading organizations. Keywords: Customer assisted knowledge production capacity, Customer capital, Intellectual capital, Knowledge managemen

A Conceptual Model for Negotiating in Service-Oriented Environments

Web services have been developed in recent years as a fundamental technique for the new generation of B2B or EAI applications. For their getting more available that imposes a new vision of service-oriented computing, the software industry has shifted its attention on software from developing a product as required to delivering a service on demand. In order to gain the many benefits from such a service-oriented model of software, several critical issues need to be addressed in a service-oriented environment such as differentiation of services with multiple attributes, dynamic selection and provision of services in a supply chain style, and commitment of services with prescribed rules. From the perspective of management, these issues are concerned within a process of negotiating desired services in a service-oriented environment. In this paper, we propose an object-oriented model that specifies such a negotiation process with explicit constructs addressing these critical issues. The model contains an architecture diagram that describes required components and their interactions for fulfilling the negotiation process, as well as a class/sequence diagram that specifies in detail what class objects these components have in order to collaboratively support all required behaviors occurred within the negotiation process

The impact of supply chain management and business analysis systems on employee creativity and organizational innovation in the government sector in the United Arab Emirates

Supply chain and business analysis technology are two essential components in determining the level of innovation and employee creativity in an organization. Continuous change, information flow, and the emergence of renewed knowledge are among the general characteristics of business analysis technology. However, there is a discrepancy in the level of supply chain management and business analysis technology for improving organizational innovation in the government sector in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Moreover, another challenge confronted by an organization that is worth studying is the difficulty of acquiring the latest and comprehensive information systems. The main objective of this research is to investigate the importance of supply chain management and business analysis technology in influencing employee creativity and organizational innovation in the government sector in the UAE. Moreover, this study examines the mediating role of employee creativity in the relationship between supply chain management and organizational innovation, business analysis technology, and organizational innovation. This quantitative study used SPSS analysis software for statistical evaluation. The questionnaire method is used in this study for collecting data to test the proposed model. 332 validated forms were collected from employees of senior management level working in the public sector organizations in Ajman, UAE. These organizations are the Ajman Free Zone, Transport and Communications Authority, Department of Municipality and Planning, Department of Land and Real Estate Regulation, Department of Finance, and Department of Economic Development. The analysis results indicate a sufficient predictive power with great prognostic significance. The proposed model explains a 59.7% variance between the variables included in the model. Moreover, the results confirm the mediating role of employee creativity in the relationships between supply chain management and organizational innovation and between business analysis and organizational innovatio

An Experimental Research on Closed Loop Supply Chain Management with Internet of Things

Abstract. Closed loop supply chain (CLSC) optimization is integration of forward and reverse logistics activities. The importance of CLSC management is increasing by legal regulations, limited energy resources and environmental- financial problems that growing in recent years. However, reverse logistics part of the CLSC is a flow type which is more difficult to made predictions, planning and controls by reason contained uncertainties. This stage, Internet of Things system reduces related uncertainties by providing all the life information of the returned product and substantially attenuates planning of reverse flow activities. In this study, a CLSC is considered that meets demands of the sales&collection center both new and remanufactured product. Manufacturer has three options (refurbishing, disassembly and disposal) to assessing returned products. A mixed integer linear programming model is proposed for a single type of product is completely modular (automobile, computer, telephone, etc.). The model meets customer's products and components demands based period, maximizes profit consist of different sales revenues and total cost (total production, purchase, transportation and disposal costs) and determines how to evaluate all returned products. The proposed model has been verified with the aid of a numerical example by solving in GAMS software and its performance reviewed with experimental studies.Keywords. Closed loop supply chain optimization, Internet of Things, Mixedinteger linear programming, Returned product management.JEL. L80, L86, Q55

Construction by Replacement: A new approach to simulation modeling

Simulation modeling can be valuable in many areas of management science, but it is often costly, time-consuming, and difficult to do. To reduce these problems, system dynamics researchers have previously developed standard pieces of model structure, called molecules, that can be reused in different models. However, the models assembled from these molecules often lacked feedback loops and generated few, if any, insights. This paper describes a new and more promising approach to using molecules in system dynamics modeling. The heart of the approach is a systematically organized library (or taxonomy) of predefined model components, or molecules, and a set of software tools for replacing one molecule with another. Users start with a simple generic model and progressively replace parts of the model with more specialized molecules from a systematically organized library of predefined components. These substitutions either create a new running model automatically or request further manual changes from the user. The paper describes our exploration using this approach to construct system dynamics models of supply chain processes in a large manufacturing company. The experiment included developing an innovative “tangible user interface” and a comprehensive catalog of system dynamics molecules. The paper concludes with a discussion of the benefits and limitations of this approach

Semantic web services for simulation component reuse and interoperability: An ontology approach

Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) Simulation Packages (CSPs) are widely used in industry primarily due to economic factors associated with developing proprietary software platforms. Regardless of their widespread use, CSPs have yet to operate across organizational boundaries. The limited reuse and interoperability of CSPs are affected by the same semantic issues that restrict the inter-organizational use of software components and web services. The current representations of Web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging Semantic Web. The authors present new research that partially alleviates the problem of limited semantic reuse and interoperability of simulation components in CSPs. Semantic models, in the form of ontologies, utilized by the authors’ Web service discovery and deployment architecture provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through a simulation component ontology that is used to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (i.e. including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The research presented here is based on the development of an ontology, connector software, and a Web service discovery architecture. The ontology is extracted from simulation scenarios involving airport, restaurant and kitchen service suppliers. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter-organizational simulation, by adopting a less intrusive interface between participants Although specific to CSPs this work has wider implications for the simulation community. The reason being that the community as a whole stands to benefit through from an increased awareness of the state-of-the-art in Software Engineering (for example, ontology-supported component discovery and reuse, and service-oriented computing), and it is expected that this will eventually lead to the development of a unique Software Engineering-inspired methodology to build simulations in future

Evolution of a supply chain management game for the trading agent competition

TAC SCM is a supply chain management game for the Trading Agent Competition (TAC). The purpose of TAC is to spur high quality research into realistic trading agent problems. We discuss TAC and TAC SCM: game and competition design, scientific impact, and lessons learnt

Ontology engineering for simulation component reuse

Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) simulation packages (CSPs) are widely used in industry, although they have yet to operate across organizational boundaries. Reuse across organizations is restricted by the same semantic issues that restrict the inter-organizational use of web services. The current representations of web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging semantic web. Semantic models, in the form of ontology, utilized by web service discovery and deployment architectures provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through the use of simulation component ontologies to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The paper presents the development of an ontology, connector software and web service discovery architecture. The ontology is extracted from simulation scenarios involving airport, restaurant and kitchen service suppliers. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter-organizational simulation, adopting a less intrusive interface between participants. Although specific to CSPs the work has wider implications for the simulation community