INVENTORYING RESOURCES: AN APPLICATION TO PRODUCT-ORIENTED AGRICULTURE

Different resources are necessary in the new, product-oriented agricultural environment. This article explores the question of what information is best suited for strategic analysis and strategy formulation for firms involved in product-oriented agriculture. A new framework for inventorying agricultural resources is introduced, and suggestions for implementing it are included.Farm Management,

INVENTORYING RESOURCES: AN APPLICATION TO PRODUCT-ORIENTED AGRICULTURE

Different resources are necessary in the new, product-oriented agricultural environment. This article explores the question of what information is best suited for strategic analysis and strategy formulation for firms involved in product-oriented agriculture. A new framework for inventorying agricultural resources is introduced, and suggestions for implementing it are included.Farm Management,

Enhancing the Supply Chain Performance by Integrating Simulated and Physical Agents into Organizational Information Systems

As the business environment gets more complicated, organizations must be able to respond to the business changes and adjust themselves quickly to gain their competitive advantages. This study proposes an integrated agent system, called SPA, which coordinates simulated and physical agents to provide an efficient way for organizations to meet the challenges in managing supply chains. In the integrated framework, physical agents coordinate with inter-organizations\' physical agents to form workable business processes and detect the variations occurring in the outside world, whereas simulated agents model and analyze the what-if scenarios to support physical agents in making decisions. This study uses a supply chain that produces digital still cameras as an example to demonstrate how the SPA works. In this example, individual information systems of the involved companies equip with the SPA and the entire supply chain is modeled as a hierarchical object oriented Petri nets. The SPA here applies the modified AGNES data clustering technique and the moving average approach to help each firm generalize customers\' past demand patterns and forecast their future demands. The amplitude of forecasting errors caused by bullwhip effects is used as a metric to evaluate the degree that the SPA affects the supply chain performance. The experimental results show that the SPA benefits the entire supply chain by reducing the bullwhip effects and forecasting errors in a dynamic environment.Supply Chain Performance Enhancement; Bullwhip Effects; Simulated Agents; Physical Agents; Dynamic Customer Demand Pattern Discovery

Make Versus Buy in Trucking: Asset Ownership, Job Design and Information

Explaining patterns of asset ownership in the economy is a central goal of both organizational economics and industrial organization. We develop a model of asset ownership in trucking, which we test by examining how the adoption of different classes of on-board computers (OBCs) between 1987 and 1997 influenced whether shippers use their own trucks for hauls or contract with for-hire carriers. We find that OBCs' incentive-improving features pushed hauls toward private carriage, but their resource-allocation-improving features pushed them toward for-hire carriage. We conclude that ownership patterns in trucking reflect the importance of both incomplete contracts (Grossman and Hart (1986)) and of job design and measurement issues (Holmstrom and Milgrom (1994)).

Understanding the Workforce Needs of New Jersey's Retail Industry

Explores the changing skill and education needs of the modern retail workplace. Identifies key skills employers require and the jobs for which employers report the most difficulty finding and keeping skilled workers

Multi Agent Systems in Logistics: A Literature and State-of-the-art Review

Based on a literature survey, we aim to answer our main question: “How should we plan and execute logistics in supply chains that aim to meet today’s requirements, and how can we support such planning and execution using IT?†Today’s requirements in supply chains include inter-organizational collaboration and more responsive and tailored supply to meet specific demand. Enterprise systems fall short in meeting these requirements The focus of planning and execution systems should move towards an inter-enterprise and event-driven mode. Inter-organizational systems may support planning going from supporting information exchange and henceforth enable synchronized planning within the organizations towards the capability to do network planning based on available information throughout the network. We provide a framework for planning systems, constituting a rich landscape of possible configurations, where the centralized and fully decentralized approaches are two extremes. We define and discuss agent based systems and in particular multi agent systems (MAS). We emphasize the issue of the role of MAS coordination architectures, and then explain that transportation is, next to production, an important domain in which MAS can and actually are applied. However, implementation is not widespread and some implementation issues are explored. In this manner, we conclude that planning problems in transportation have characteristics that comply with the specific capabilities of agent systems. In particular, these systems are capable to deal with inter-organizational and event-driven planning settings, hence meeting today’s requirements in supply chain planning and execution.supply chain;MAS;multi agent systems

Scheduling the scheduling task : a time management perspective on scheduling

Time is the most critical resource at the disposal of schedulers. Hence, an adequate management of time from the schedulers may impact positively on the scheduler’s productivity and responsiveness to uncertain scheduling environments. This paper presents a field study of how schedulers make use of their time and makes explicit what time-management decisions and behaviors are available to a scheduler. Based on observations of the field study, we propose a framework to classify and specify key characteristics of common tasks to the scheduling job in terms of their impact on the workflow and workload of a scheduler. We then discuss how such a framework may be used to assess alternative time-management decisions of a scheduler