420 research outputs found
Optimal Planning Quantities for Product Transition
The replacement of an existing product with a new one presents many challenges. In particular, uncertainties in a new product introduction often lead to extreme cases of demand and supply mismatches. This paper addresses inventory planning decisions for product upgrades when there is no replenishment opportunity during the transition period. We allow product substitution: when a company runs out of the old product, a customer may be offered the new product as a substitute. We show that the optimal substitution decision is a time-varying threshold policy and establish the optimal planning policy. Further, we determine the optimal delay in a new product introduction, given the initial inventory of the old product
Understanding the impact of protection on manufacturing efficiency levels and relative pharmaceutical prices evidence from Egyptâs generics pharmaceutical industry (1993-2008)
This thesis aims at contributing to the literature on industrial policy by investigating patterns of 'association' between trade and industrial policies, the countryâs national pharmaceutical policy (including pricing), the pre-January 2005 intellectual property rights
regime, productivity and productivity growth in the Egyptian generics pharmaceutical sector. This thesis presented evidence that positive total factor productivity (TFP) growth can be observed under the auspices of a protectionist regime, however, there is a need to revisit pharmaceutical regulatory protectionism, as it impacts negatively on export growth and on fair pharmaceutical prices. Under the auspices of what can be categorised as a protectionist regulatory regime, this thesis examined trends in TFP growth in 13 of Egypt's pharmaceutical generics firms, which account for 50 percent of the generics market by value. Empirical results indicated that the best-practice firm in terms of TFP change belonged to the private sector, while the laggard firm belonged to the state-owned public business sector. Empirical results indicated that mean TFP change for the sample firms throughout the study period 1993-2005 (1.01)
exceeded the mean TFP change for all Egyptian industries (0.75), and that there was evident disassociation or weak correlation -at best- between productivity growth and the
degree of export orientation. In light of both the absence of significant generics import competition in Egypt, it has been found that prices of generics were atypical in terms of exceeding standard worldwide generic-to-originator price ratios. Generic diffusion did not significantly bring down
average prices, while an evident wedge was observed between the market shares of the most sold generics versus the least-priced generics to the advantage of the former. As a result of enforcing pharmaceutical product patent protection as of January 2005, the price-related impact of the TRIPS Agreement in the domain of Egyptâs top 42 therapeutic
classes by market value (50 percent of the market), has been put in the range of LE 479 million
Product rollover strategy and inventory policy of a monopoly manufacturing substitutable products
Ankara : The Department of Industrial Engineering and the Institute of Engineering and Sciences of Bilkent University, 2010.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2010.Includes bibliographical references leaves 107-112.In many industries, effective management of product rollovers is extremely
important for being able to survive. In management of product rollovers, timing
decision; i.e., time to introduce of a secondary product and time to phase
out a primal product is critical. Inventory policy is another factor that affects
management of rollovers.
In this study, we analyze primary rollover strategy of a monopoly manufacturing
two substitute products together with its contingency strategies over a two
period planning term. Specifically, we consider four different primary rollover
strategies, namely Base Strategy, IS Strategy, ISES Strategy and IFES Strategy,
derived with existence/non-existence of the products. Base Strategy is associated
with the case where we decide to introduce and sell only the primary product. On
the other hand, IS Strategy brings introduction of a newer (secondary) product in
the second period. If monopoly chooses to make its move with IFES Strategy, it
introduces both of the products simultaneously in the first period while phasing
out the primary product in the beginning of the next period. Another alternative
strategy, ISES Strategy, would be selling products in different periods, primary
product first and secondary product next.
When a primary strategy is selected, there is a commitment to this strategy.
In this study, to reflect market conditions, we consider two alternative demand
forms; multiplicative and additive forms and there is an adjustment to market
through inventory policy. Firm replenishes its stocks with an order-up-to policy
in each period where demands for these substitute products are assumed to be
correlated and these products assumed to be substitutable; i.e., there exists stockout-induced
substitution between the products.In the analysis, we determine the optimal inventory levels when a specified
rollover strategy is executed. Moreover, we explore the conditions, which play
important role in making rollover strategies. Furthermore, factors that affect
early and late introduction of a new product into the market are investigated.
We also discuss the factors that motivate a monopoly to introduce a new product.Koca, EsmaM.S
Monitoring and diagnosis of energy consumption in wastewater treatment plants. A state of the art and proposals for improvement
In response to strong growth in energy intensive wastewater treatment, public agencies and industry began to explore and implement measures to ensure achievement of the targets indicated in the 2020 Climate and Energy Package. However, in the absence of fundamental and globally recognized approach evaluating wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) energy performance, these policies could be economically wasteful. This paper gives an overview of the literature of WWTP energy-use performance and of the state of the art methods for energy benchmarking. The literature review revealed three main benchmarking approaches: normalization, statistical techniques and programming techniques, and advantages and disadvantages were identified for each one. While these methods can be used for comparison, the diagnosis of the energy performance remains an unsolved issue. Besides, a large dataset of WWTP energy consumption data, together with the methods for synthesizing the information, are presented and discussed. It was found that no single key performance indicators (KPIs) used to characterize the energy performance could be used universally. The assessment of a large data sample provided some evidence about the effect of the plant size, dilution factor and flowrate. The technology choice, plant layout and country of location were seen as important elements that contributed to the large variability observed
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The Design of Resilient Engineering Infrastructure Systems
The concept of resilience has emerged from a number of domains to address how systems, people as well as organisations can handle uncertainty and thereby not only survive hardship, but also thrive and prosper. This is of particular importance for engineering infrastructure systems which, due to the inherently long lifecycles giving rise to many unknowns, need to be designed for resilience such that it not only maintains operations in the face of day-to-day demands, but also continue to be able to evolve for the future. While there has been substantial interest in resilience from both academia and industry, exactly how such systems may be endowed with resilience to address these concerns from an engineering design perspective is less clear.
To this end, a literature review was first conducted to compile the definitions and characteristics of resilience across the domains of engineering, organisational management and ecology. The characteristics were found to comprise: absorbing disturbances, adapting for change and thriving for the future. These were then mapped to the engineering design ilities of robustness, adaptability and flexibility before being brought together in a conceptual model to form a strategic view for resilience. Further methods from resilience and engineering design literature were then consulted to understand how this particular view could be modelled and evaluated. This led to the development of a preliminary model using the Least Squares Monte Carlo method adapted for a telecommunications case study.
The insights gained from these explorations were then used to drive the synthesis of a novel support method whereby the design for flexibility framework was adapted to include decision modelling with Bayesian Networks and for resilience analysis. Here, resilience is taken to be the maximisation of the system economic lifecycle value under uncertainty, as measured by Expected Net Present Value, through robust and flexible strategies. This was applied to two case studies involving infrastructure systems: the first built upon existing work based on a Waste-to-Energy system in Singapore to verify the new method while the second applied the support method with BT, a multinational telecommunications company based in the UK, to gauge reception of this approach in industry. In both cases, the initial capacity and maximum number of upgrades served as proxies for robustness and flexibility respectively. Results demonstrate that Bayesian Networks are able to model decision rules for flexibility by selecting technology options over time given observations on the system and are also useful for extracting expert domain knowledge. While the construction of Bayesian Networks are subjective, they present an intuitive visualisation of the dependencies in a system and as such, engaged stakeholder interest. Resilience analysis examined the effect of volatility and drift of demand on the design strategies and indeed, there existed a trade-off between robust and flexible strategies. Furthermore, the greater utility of the support method lies in aiding decision makers in exploring the solution space and prompting discussions for what-if scenarios for the organisation.BT Grou
Essays on supply chain contracting and tactical decisions for inter-generational product transitions
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2007.Includes bibliographical references ().In this dissertation, we explore problems in two areas of Supply Chain Management. The first relates to strategic supplier management. The second focuses on tactical decisions on inventory and pricing during inter-generational product transition. In many industries, manufacturing firms use multiple competing suppliers in their component or product sourcing strategy. Chapter 2 studies optimal history-dependent contracts with multiple suppliers in a dynamic, uncertain, imperfect-information environment. The results provide an optimal contract structure for the manufacture and optimal performance and effort paths for the suppliers. We compare incentives in the form of product margin and that of business volume. Our results suggest that a volume contract may increase the total profit for the supply chain, partly due to its ability to allocate higher volume to the supplier that is more likely to input high effort, and partly through relative performance evaluation. However, for two suppliers with large asymmetry, it is better to contract independently with each supplier using margin incentive, rather than forcing them into a volume race. Chapter 3 studies the inventory planning decisions in the context of a technology product transition, i.e., when a new generation product replaces an old one. High uncertainties in a new product introduction coupled with long lead-time often lead to extreme cases of demand and supply mismatches. When a company runs out of the old product, a customer may be offered the new product as a substitute. We show that the optimal substitution decision is a time-varying threshold policy and establish the optimal planning policy. Further, we determine the optimal delay in new product introduction, given the initial inventory of the old product.(cont.) In Chapter 4, we study the optimal pricing decisions during a product transition. We restrict the new product price to be constant and formulate the dynamic pricing problem for the old product. We derive a closed-form solution for the optimal price under non-homogeneous Poisson demands. In addition, we compare three heuristic pricing policies: fixed-price, two-price, and myopic rolling-horizon policies. The results suggest that changing price once during the transition (the two-price policy) improves the profit dramatically and is near optimal.by Hongmin Li.Ph.D
Report No. 28: Review of Methodologies Applied for the Assessment of Employment and Social Impacts
Joint report with ECORYS Netherlands for the DG Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities of the European Commission, Bonn 2010 (217 pages)
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