Service : the new focus in international manufacturing and trade

Major breakthroughs in communications technologies in the 1980s made it possible to monitor all phases of moving a product from raw material sourcing through processing to delivery to the customer. Close monitoring revealed major inefficiencies in the traditional set-up of materials acquisition, production, and distribution - especially large inventory holdings. At the same time, patterns of customer demand began to shift more rapidly, partly because of better communications networks. The need to reduce costs and become responsive to volatile changes in customer preferences forced businesses to substantially restructure their corporate practices. With domestic factor costs rising, manufacturers outsourced intermediate production to foreign enterprises in countries with lower wages. Merchants also sought cheaper supply sources - developments that held promise for developing countries. Many developing countries have been unable to take advantage of structural changes in world manufacturing and trade because they have been unable to deliver the quality of production, fast turnaround, and reliability of delivery manufacturing businesses need to keep up with changing market demand. A new management approach - logistics management - is needed to cut business costs and to be more responsive to rapidly changing markets. Logistics management orchestrates materials acquisition, production, and marketing to reduce inventories to a minimum. Effective logistics management enables many organizations to conduct their business with less than a week's worth of supplies. Such a radical change requires major corporate restructuring and the development of strategic alliances with service providers. Outsourcing of production is projected to continue growing, and the search for less costly supply sources will continue. Developing countries can capitalize on those trends - but only if they substantially improve their infrastructure, liberalize their regulations, and begin to apply modern logistics management techniques. If they do not, their outlook is not promising.Transport and Trade Logistics,Common Carriers Industry,Business in Development,Business Environment,Environmental Economics&Policies

Logistics’ place in the global administration of the product’s life cycle

If logistics can be considered an assembly of methods, functions, and ways used by a company with the purpose of giving clients the goods taken at a low price and in a period of time according to clients’ expectations, taking into consideration the quantities settled by contract, we can say that, in a company, the logistics functionality contributes to coordination the offer by requiring the lowest costs, based on some strategic and tactics plans as well as keeping qualitative relations between suppliers and clients. Logistics can be said to represent the optimization of the company’s both fundamental cycles: the cycle-client (from order to delivery) and the project-cycle (from conception to use). From this point of view, this is an essential component of both the strategy and the companies’ organization. Some companies in West Europe have moved or created new production plants in Centre and East Europe, mainly in the new member states of the European Union (NOKIA from Germany to Romania, RENAULT from France to Romania etc.). This is based on some detailed research on the importance that a functional logistics of industrial platforms has taking into consideration both raw materials and clients’ satisfaction, who, more often than not is far from the production place.client, distribution, performance, supplier, supply.

Supply chain management: An opportunity for metaheuristics

In today’s highly competitive and global marketplace the pressure on organizations to find new ways to create and deliver value to customers grows ever stronger. In the last two decades, logistics and supply chain has moved to the center stage. There has been a growing recognition that it is through an effective management of the logistics function and the supply chain that the goal of cost reduction and service enhancement can be achieved. The key to success in Supply Chain Management (SCM) require heavy emphasis on integration of activities, cooperation, coordination and information sharing throughout the entire supply chain, from suppliers to customers. To be able to respond to the challenge of integration there is the need of sophisticated decision support systems based on powerful mathematical models and solution techniques, together with the advances in information and communication technologies. The industry and the academia have become increasingly interested in SCM to be able to respond to the problems and issues posed by the changes in the logistics and supply chain. We present a brief discussion on the important issues in SCM. We then argue that metaheuristics can play an important role in solving complex supply chain related problems derived by the importance of designing and managing the entire supply chain as a single entity. We will focus specially on the Iterated Local Search, Tabu Search and Scatter Search as the ones, but not limited to, with great potential to be used on solving the SCM related problems. We will present briefly some successful applications.Supply chain management, metaheuristics, iterated local search, tabu search and scatter search

THE CHANGES ON THE FIELD OF LOGISTIC ACTIVITIES

If logistics can be considered an assembly of methods, functions, and ways used by a company with the purpose of giving clients the goods taken at a low price and in a period of time according to clients’ expectations, taking into consideration the quantities settled by contract, we can say that, in a company, the logistics functionality contributes to coordination the offer by requiring the lowest costs, based on some strategic and tactics plans as well as keeping qualitative relations between suppliers and clients. Logistics can be said to represent the optimization of the company’s both fundamental cycles: the cycle-client (from order to delivery) and the project-cycle (from conception to use). From this point of view, this is an essential component of both the strategy and the companies’ organization. Some companies in West Europe have moved or created new production plants in Centre and East Europe, mainly in the new member states of the European Union (NOKIA from Germany to Romania, RENAULT from France to Romania, etc). This is based on some detailed research on the importance that a functional logistics of industrial platforms has taking into consideration both raw materials and clients’ satisfaction, who, more often than not is far from the production place.planning, distribution, management, supply, market

E-business and circular supply chains : increased business opportunities by IT-based customer oriented return-flow management

This paper deals with the application of IT in circular supply chains (CSCs). We consider information on the installed base critical, and present an illustrative example. Next we discuss a framework of different kinds of value contained in a return, and IT-applications useful in supporting its recovery or neutralisation in case of negative externalities. Also we show which kind of CSC is needed for which kind of return. We illustrate our work by three real life case studies.reverse logistics;supply chain management;electronic commerce;product life cycle

Decision support for build-to-order supply chain management through multiobjective optimization

This paper aims to identify the gaps in decision-making support based on multiobjective optimization for build-to-order supply chain management (BTOSCM). To this end, it reviews the literature available on modelling build-to-order supply chains (BTO-SC) with the focus on adopting multiobjective optimization (MOO) techniques as a decision support tool. The literature has been classified based on the nature of the decisions in different part of the supply chain, and the key decision areas across a typical BTO-SC are discussed in detail. Available software packages suitable for supporting decision making in BTO supply chains are also identified and their related solutions are outlined. The gap between the modelling and optimization techniques developed in the literature and the decision support needed in practice are highlighted and future research directions to better exploit the decision support capabilities of MOO are proposed

Logistics outsourcing and 3PL selection: A Case study in an automotive supply chain

Outsourcing logistics functions to third-party logistics (3PL) providers has been a source of competitive advantage for most companies. Companies cite greater flexibility, operational efficiency, improved customer service levels, and a better focus on their core businesses as part of the advantages of engaging the services of 3PL providers. There are few complete and structured methodologies for selecting a 3PL provider. This paper discusses how one such methodology, namely the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), is used in an automotive supply chain for export parts to redesign the logistics operations and to select a global logistics service provider