Cow-Calf Producer Perceptions Regarding Individual Animal Traceability

This study provides valuable insights into cow-calf producer voluntary participation in the National Animal Identification System and producers’ perceptions of several issues critically impacting the success of voluntary traceability systems. Cow-calf producers believe that the most important issues to the U.S. beef industry in designing a national, individual animal traceability system are monitoring/managing disease, maintaining current foreign markets, accessing foreign markets, and increasing consumer confidence. Furthermore, producers are concerned with cost, liability, reliability of technology, failure of system to meet stated goals, and confidentiality of information associated with these systems.animal traceability, cow-calf, National Animal Identification System, voluntary adoption, Agribusiness, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Crop Production/Industries, Farm Management, Labor and Human Capital, Land Economics/Use, Livestock Production/Industries, Production Economics, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies, Q12, Q18, R38,

A simulation based supply partner selection decision support tool for service provision in Dell.

Partner selection is an important aspect of all outsourcing processes. Traditional partner selection, typically involves steps to determine the criteria for outsourcing, followed by a qualification of potential suppliers and concluding with a final selection of partner(s). Reverse auctions (RAs) have widely been used for partner selection in recent times. However, RAs, although proven successful in initial price reduction strategies for product and service provision, can suffer from reduced effectiveness as the number of executions increases. This paper illustrates Dell’s experience of such diminishing returns for its outsourced after sales product repair service and presents the development, of a new partner selection methodology which incorporates a new process improvement stage to be executed in combination with the final selection phase. This new methodology is underpinned by the development of a computer based simulation supply partner selection decision support tool for service provision. The paper highlights the significant additional cost saving benefits achievable and improvement in service through the use of advanced simulation based decision supports

A Multi-Tier Negotiation Protocol for Logistics Service Chains

Logistics service chains are characterized by multiple service providers contributing to the provision of a composite logistics service to a customer. In particular, various contractual dependencies exist across service chain levels. The object of our research is resource allocation which has to consider these dependencies to avoid overcommitment and overpurchasing. We propose a multi-tier negotiation protocol for solving this problem. The proposed artifact is developed from an interaction protocol engineering perspective in accordance with the design science paradigm. First evaluation experiments show that the protocol prevents overcommitments and overpurchasing, leading to higher expected profits for logistics service providers