Lateral transshipment of slow moving critical medical items

This research studies lateral transshipment of critical medical items that have low demands. Due to the high prices of medical items and their limited shelf lives, the expirations contribute significantly to the current prohibitively high cost of the healthcare system. Lateral transshipment between hospitals in a medical system provides opportunities to reduce the expiration costs. This paper studies the decision rule for lateral transshipment in a two-hospital system and extends the rule for the multiple-hospital cases. The decision rule takes the myopic best action by assuming no transshipments will be performed in the future. Numerical experiments demonstrate significant cost savings and the decision rule has a small gap from the upper bound of the total saving. The savings are more considerable when the difference of demand rates at different locations is large and the life time of the medical item is not too long or too short

Les frontières de la recherche en contrôle de gestion : une analyse des cadres théoriques mobilisés

De nombreux auteurs mettent l'accent sur la nécessité d'une ouverture disciplinaire dans les travaux de recherche. Notre article vise à analyser l'importance d'une telle démarche au travers de l'étude de ses enjeux et des pratiques des chercheurs en contrôle de gestion. Plus précisément, nous avons tenté de cerner le degré de perméabilité des travaux en contrôle à des cadres conceptuels externes. Pour ce faire, les numéros de revues françaises – Comptabilité, Contrôle, Audit et Finance, Contrôle, Stratégie – et d'une revue américaine – Management science – ont été analysés pour la période 2000 – 2007.épistémologie; contrôle de gestion; cadres théoriques

The Impact of Green Metrics on Inventory Transshipment

Green is associated with life and is becoming increasingly engrained in not just life, but the way people do business as well. In recent years, a growing number of business operations have adopted various green metrics to limit their carbon footprints and environmental pollution, drive sustainable operations, contribute more to sustainability projects, and appear more socially responsible within the industry and host communities. While these initiatives target reducing carbon footprints, their impact on daily operations in a sharing economy is yet to be explored. In this thesis, I performed a thorough review of green supply chains, recent green practices, and metrics adopted in various organizations, followed by a comparative study to analyze the impact of operational decisions in inventory and transshipment when green metrics are considered. I extended the classical inventory transshipment model with two newsvendors’ retailers by allowing the retailers to incorporate direct or indirect green metrics as part of the objective function. In this setting, I explored three central research questions: 1) How would the adoption of green metrics impact the expected profit and equilibrium order quantities under inventory transshipment? 2) Would green metrics negatively or positively impact the coordinating transshipment prices? 3) What is the impact of direct vs. indirect green metrics on expected profit and equilibrium order quantities? Based on extensive numerical simulation, I find that when the profit margin is high, the impact of green metrics is limited—there is almost no change to a slight decrease in expected profit and the equilibrium order quantity when green metrics are considered. However, when the profit margin is low, the green metrics may improve the expected profits while reducing equilibrium order quantities. Interestingly, introducing green metrics does not affect coordinating transshipment prices, irrespective of profit margins. Direct versus indirect metrics have a limited impact on equilibrium order quantity and expected profit. My study contributes to the research by identifying the operational benefits of adopting green metrics. As an extension, this work may create a foundation for further work to determine the cost and benefits of implementing green metrics in practice and the key trade-offs in sustainability or social responsibility

Stability and Endogenous Formation of Inventory Transshipment Networks

This paper studies a cooperative game of inventory transshipment among multiple firms. In this game, firms first make their inventory decisions independently and then decide collectively how to transship excess inventories to satisfy unmet demands. In modeling transshipment, we use networks of firms as the primitive, which offer a richer representation of relationships among firms by taking the coalitions used in all previous studies as special cases. For any given cooperative network, we construct a dual price allocation under which the network is stable for any residual demands and supplies in the sense that no firms find it more profitable to form subnetworks. Under the allocation based on the marginal contribution of each firm to its network (called the MJW value), we show that various network structures such as complete, hub-spoke, and chain networks are stable only under certain conditions on residual amounts. Moreover, these conditions differ across network structures, implying that a network structure plays an important role in establishing the stability of a decentralized transshipment system. Finally, we consider the case when firms establish networks endogenously, and show that pairwise Nash stable networks underperform the corresponding networks in centralized systems. </jats:p