Environmentally Concerned Logistics Operations in Fuzzy Environment: A Literature Survey

Growing environmental awareness coupled with stricter governmental regulations has fueled the need for integrating sustainability into supply chain and logistics activities. Accordingly, recent studies in the literature have emphasized the significance of environmentally concerned logistics operations (ECLO). Research in the broad area of ECLO encompasses a wide range of topics including sustainable supply chain, green supply chain, closed-loop supply chain, low-carbon logistics, and waste management. In this paper, a comprehensive content analysis and area review is presented. Over 800 papers published between 1994 and 2017 in peer-reviewed journals, proceedings, and book chapters are utilized. These papers are analyzed in consecutive stages after being reviewed under a structural dimension process that addresses the fields of environmentally concerned logistics operations. Following the state-of-the-art review, a detailed analysis of ECLO research with a special emphasis on fuzzy applications is provided. The findings clearly indicate that the fuzzy multi-criteria decision making technique is a frequently used hybrid method, whereas fuzzy sets theory and other fuzzy hybrid techniques identify a gap in the related literature. This paper provides further critical analysis and other research suggestions in order to clarify these gaps and offer additional research perspectives. This information may provide extensive data that will enable future researchers to fill these gaps within this field.https://doi.org/10.3390/logistics101000

International manufacturing relocation - the phenomenon of backshoring

Recently, firms have started to bring back once offshored manufacturing activities from far distant locations, an activity referred to as backshoring. The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to the understanding of the backshoring phenomenon by answering four research questions related to different aspects of manufacturing relocation. Thereby, the thesis makes several important contributions to researchers that aim to understand why firms are relocating manufacturing activities, and to practitioners that aim to be competitive in the global market by optimizing their manufacturing network.The thesis is based on the results of five articles from two separate studies. The first study is a survey study aimed at manufacturing plants in Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, with questions related to manufacturing relocations during a five-year period. In particular, the survey captures data about the drivers and benefits of a specific offshoring project and a specific backshoring project, thus providing unique possibilities to compare the two relocation directions. The second study is a literature study, followed by two types of meta-analyses of previously published case studies. The meta-analyses allowed for accumulation of existing knowledge, in an effort to accelerate the progress of the field. There are many potential drivers of manufacturing relocation in the backshoring literature. This thesis presents two different ways of grouping them. The results are similar, and indicate that cost, access to competences and access to market are the three most important drivers to explain offshoring and backshoring. However, firms backshore manufacturing activities for considerably different reasons than they offshore. In addition to the relocation drivers, contextual aspects such as plant size, industry and geography also influence the relocation decision. Interestingly, the results show that there is a causal relationship between backshoring and the previous, related, offshoring activity, which means that the offshoring decision has an impact on the subsequent backshoring decision. After relocation, firms are experiencing different benefits depending on the relocation direction. The results show that drivers and benefits are aligned, which indicates that firms realize the expected benefits from a relocation project. However, if the firm desires performance improvements on a broader scale, there is a need to balance the relocation motivations as no driver alone leads to benefits in all performance measures. Based on the results of the meta-analysis, a framework for backshoring studies was created, that includes all aspects identified by previous literature, and that takes into consideration the previous offshoring project. As such, this thesis presents the first complete backshoring framework that considers offshoring and backshoring together

Terrorism affected regions : the impact of different supply chain risk management strategies on financial performance

Purpose: Current geo-political events, such as terrorism and climatologic adversities, have highlighted the potential risks to supply chains (SCs), and their disastrous financial impacts on supply chains. Within supply chains, risk management plays a major role in successfully managing business processes in a proactive manner and ensuring the business continuity and financial performance (FP). The purpose of this study is to explore the supply chain risks and strategies in a terrorism-affected region (TAR), and to examine supply chain risk management (SCRM) strategies and their impacts on FP, including the war on terror (WoT) and its impacts on the local logistics industry. In addition, this study investigates the knowledge gaps in the published research on terrorism-related risk in supply chains, and develops a framework of strategies and effective decision-making to enable practitioners to address terrorism-related risks for SCRM.Methodology: The study initially adopts a novel combination of triangulated methods comprising a systematic literature review, text mining, and network analysis. Additionally, risk identification, risk analysis and strategies scrutiny are conducted by using semi-structured interviews and Qualitative Content Analysis in a TAR. A model of strategies was developed from a review of existing studies and interviews. The model is empirically tested with survey data of 80 firms using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA).Findings: This study reveals a number of key themes in the field of SCRM linked with terrorism. It identifies relevant mitigation strategies and practices for effective strategic decision-making. This subsequently leads to development of a strategic framework, consisting of strategies and effective-decision making practices to address terrorism-related risks that affect SCRM. It also identifies key the knowledge gaps in the literature and explores the main contributions by disciplines (e.g., business schools, engineering, and maritime institutions) and countries.Further, it identifies the SC risks in a TAR, which consist of value streams: disruption risks, operational risks and financial risks. Among these, the emerging risks emcompass terrorist groups’ demand for protection money, smog, paedophilia and the use of containers to block protesters. To mitigate these risks, firms frequently implemented the following strategies: information sharing, SC coordination, risk sharing, SC finance, SC security and facilitation payment. Five strategies out of the six (except facilitation payment) are able to lead to FP, confirmed quantitatively as well. There are various equifinal configurations of SCRM strategies leading to FP. In addition, information sharing acts as a moderator in the relationship between SC security and FP. SC coordination has a mediating role in the relationship between information sharing and SC security capabilities and FP.Research limitations/Contribution: The sample size a limitation of the study, meaning that the findings should be generalized with caution. The most valuable implications is the identification of configurations of strategies that can help managers and policymakers in implementing those findings.Originality/value: No empirical study was found in the SCRM literature that specifically investigates the relationships between the identified strategies and FP with fsQCA, in particular in a TAR context; this study thus fills an important gap in the SCRM literature and contributes empirically

Supply chain uncertainty:a review and theoretical foundation for future research

Supply-chain uncertainty is an issue with which every practising manager wrestles, deriving from the increasing complexity of global supply networks. Taking a broad view of supply-chain uncertainty (incorporating supply-chain risk), this paper seeks to review the literature in this area and develop a theoretical foundation for future research. The literature review identifies a comprehensive list of 14 sources of uncertainty, including those that have received much research attention, such as the bullwhip effect, and those more recently described, such as parallel interaction. Approaches to managing these sources of uncertainty are classified into: 10 approaches that seek to reduce uncertainty at its source; and, 11 approaches that seek to cope with it, thereby minimising its impact on performance. Manufacturing strategy theory, including the concepts of alignment and contingency, is then used to develop a model of supply-chain uncertainty, which is populated using the literature review to show alignment between uncertainty sources and management strategies. Future research proposed includes more empirical research in order to further investigate: which uncertainties occur in particular industrial contexts; the impact of appropriate sources/management strategy alignment on performance; and the complex interplay between management strategies and multiple sources of uncertainty (positive or negative)

Effect of Digital Enablement of Business-to-Business Exchange on Customer Outcomes: The Role of Information Systems Quality and Relationship Characteristics

This study extends our understanding of how information systems impact business value creation by examining the effect of digital enablement of business-to-business exchange on customer outcomes. We shed light on the connection between information technology investment and firm performance by focusing on how information technology is used (Devaraj and Kohli 2003) in an industrial services context and by highlighting the importance of indirect effects (Mittal and Nault 2009). A conceptual model is developed that combines a customer centric perspective (Sheth et al. 2000) with elements from the information systems success framework (DeLone and McLean 1992, DeLone and McLean 2003). Mediating factors are identified in the chain of effects from information technology specific business-to-business service quality characteristics to customer outcomes. In addition, we consider two contextual factors, relationship duration and customer dependence, which are known to alter the nature of buyer-supplier relationships but which have received little attention in research on digital enablement of business-to-business exchange. An empirical test of hypothesized relationships was performed using subjective and objective archival data from business-to-business exchange relationships for a logistics services vendor. All expected main effects were confirmed. Customer satisfaction was found to be a significant mediator in the chain of effects from information technology specific business-to-business service quality characteristics to customer outcomes. In addition, logistics service quality was found to mediate the relationships between system quality and customer satisfaction and between information quality and customer satisfaction. The hypothesized moderating effects, however, were not found to be significant. Robustness of the findings was confirmed by testing model hypotheses using data from exchange relationships with customers in two different industries, manufacturing and wholesale trade. Differences in analysis results are consistent with industry differences. This study contributes to the literatures on interorganizational information systems (Rai et al. 2006) and information technology business value (Melville et al. 2004) by identifying mediating mechanisms in the chain of effects from digital enablement of exchange to customer outcomes. Explication of mediating mechanisms improves our understanding about the indirect nature of impacts from information technology. This study also contributes to the literature on information systems by extending DeLone and McLean\u27s (2003) model of information systems success to the context of business-to-business exchange relationships. In addition, this study contributes to the literature on services marketing (Zeithaml and Bitner 2003, Berry and Parasuraman 1993) by showing how system quality and information quality impact logistics service quality and customer satisfaction in a business-to-business exchange context

Operational Research: Methods and Applications

Throughout its history, Operational Research has evolved to include a variety of methods, models and algorithms that have been applied to a diverse and wide range of contexts. This encyclopedic article consists of two main sections: methods and applications. The first aims to summarise the up-to-date knowledge and provide an overview of the state-of-the-art methods and key developments in the various subdomains of the field. The second offers a wide-ranging list of areas where Operational Research has been applied. The article is meant to be read in a nonlinear fashion. It should be used as a point of reference or first-port-of-call for a diverse pool of readers: academics, researchers, students, and practitioners. The entries within the methods and applications sections are presented in alphabetical order. The authors dedicate this paper to the 2023 Turkey/Syria earthquake victims. We sincerely hope that advances in OR will play a role towards minimising the pain and suffering caused by this and future catastrophes

THE GLOBALIZATION OF SMALLER AGRI-FOOD FIRMS: CONCEPTS, FINDINGS AND PRESCRIPTIVE RECOMMENDATIONS

Agribusiness,

Service Chain Logistics Management for Increasing Equipment Uptime

Currently, as Industrial Product Service Systems (IPS2) concepts are becoming increasingly adopted by capital assets suppliers, further increase of equipment uptimes is increasingly gaining attention by academics and practitioners. Uptimes can be managed by both improving the maintenance decision making as well as considering appropriate service supply chain design decisions. Furthermore, the integration of Industry 4.0 tools can further boost the previous with its communication and connectivity ability. Knowledge on these aspects is available in academia as well as in practice, but, as this paper argues, not structured for making decisions that consider all of these aspects in an integrated way aiming at improving equipment uptime. Through literature review, we assess the existing literature on IPS2. In doing so this paper offers a two-fold contribution: On the one hand, it presents an exploratory literature review to identify knowledge gap and on the other hand, it proposes a suitable future research project

Smart supply chain management in Industry 4.0

The emerging information and communication technologies (ICT) related to Industry 4.0 play a critical role to enhance supply chain performance. Employing the smart technologies has led to so-called smart supply chains. Understanding how Industry 4.0 and related ICT affect smart supply chains and how smart supply chains evolve with the support of the advanced technologies are vital to practical and academic communities. Existing review works on smart supply chains with ICT mainly rely on the academic literature alone. This paper presents an integrated approach to explore the effects of Industry 4.0 and related ICT on smart supply chains, by combining introduction of the current national strategies in North America, the research status analysis on ICT assisted supply chains from the major North American national research councils, and a systematic literature review of the subject. Besides, we introduce a smart supply chain hierarchical framework with multi-level intelligence. Furthermore, the challenges faced by supply chains under Industry 4.0 and future research directions are discussed as well

Green supply chain management: an investigation on the construction sector

Environmental pollution and climate change have become one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century, which have forced governments and businesses alike to assess the environmental impacts of their activities. Among the sectors, construction is the single largest contributor of global carbon emissions, resource, water and energy consumption, and landfill waste. With environmental implications expected to be even greater in the future due to increasing urbanisation and the consequent increase in construction activities, curtailing the negative environmental impacts of the sector or greening the construction sector, therefore, has become critical. Unfortunately, any limited efforts to date to address these concerns have been less fruitful as most of these efforts have been largely fragmented and disjoint, addressing issues in an ad-hoc, standalone manner such as green design, green purchasing, green construction or environmental management systems; or management issues such as ‘drivers’ and/or ‘barriers’ affecting these specific green practices; or specific performance implications from these green practices such as environmental and/or financial performance. This lack of holistic orientation also carries the risk that practitioners and policymakers could mistakenly be addressing the wrong issues and neglecting aspects that have more significance in greening the sector. Given the environmental consequences of a construction project are typically dispersed across the different stages in the supply chain, i.e. from design through to end-of-life, and that several stakeholders, each with their own conflicting interests, are involved in the different stages of the construction supply chain, greening the sector, therefore, requires a supply chain wide focus, inclusive of all key stages and stakeholders (Developers, Architects/Consultants, Contractors and Suppliers). Therefore, the application of green supply chain management (GSCM) or incorporating environmental concerns into supply chain management (a systematic and integrated approach) makes perfect sense for greening the construction sector. GSCM contributes to greening by promoting supply chain-wide implementation of efficient and effective green practices by means of managing the ‘drivers’ and ‘barriers’ affecting its implementation to achieve the desired environmental performance along with short-term economic/cost performance and long-term organisational performance. This formed the focus of this study, wherein, it explores the application of GSCM in greening the construction sector. The study also explores the impact of firm size and ownership on GSCM, because, given the inherent complexity of the construction supply chain, i.e. it comprises of hundreds of firms with varying size and ownership, a comprehensive greening of the construction supply chain would not be possible without managing the impact of size and ownership on GSCM. Finally, given that GSCM understanding would be of limited value unless accompanied by general principles (theories) that inform wider application, the study utilises several established and emerging management/organisational theories to underpin the multifaceted reality of GSCM. In short, each of these GSCM aspects, i.e. green practices, green drivers and barriers, and green performance; and their interrelationships; and the impact of firm size and ownership on GSCM are investigated as separate research questions in this thesis. UAE is carefully chosen as the research setting for this GSCM study mainly because it gives an exemplary opportunity to understand the competing actions required from governments and construction sector firms to lessen the environmental impacts associated with the rapid urbanisation and economic modernisation. Specifically, on one side, the UAE construction sector is growing at more than 9% per annum, while on the other side several green initiatives are considered by practitioners and policymakers to reduce its environmental burden on the country. Therefore, the related findings are expected to be more practically relevant to comprehend the challenges and opportunities in the application of GSCM. A pragmatic, multi-methodology, sequential exploratory approach (i.e. the qualitative investigation followed by quantitative investigation) was employed to comprehensively answer the research questions. For the qualitative investigation, both semi-structured interviews (to explore and define each GSCM themes/sub-themes), and focussed, in-depth interviews (to gain operational/implementation level understanding) were employed. For the quantitative investigation, a structured country-wide survey was employed. The findings derived from the multiple methods (interviews and survey), were then combined to develop a comprehensive picture on the various facets of GSCM in relation to greening the construction sector. With regard to the findings, the important/relevant core green practices (or environmental activities/initiatives undertaken across each of the distinct functional stages of the supply chain) identified for greening the construction sector include green design, green purchasing, green transportation, green construction/manufacturing and end of life green practices, whereas the important/relevant facilitating green practices (or activities/initiatives undertaken to build internal environmental resources and capabilities) identified for greening the construction sector include environmental management systems (EMS) and ISO 14001 certification, cross-functional integration, environmental auditing, environmental training and green-related research and development. The extent of implementation of these practices, in general, was found to be the highest among Suppliers, moderate among Architects/Consultants and Contractors, and lowest among Developers. The important/relevant external green drivers (external forces/pressures that coerce firms to implement green practices) identified include government green-related regulation, supply chain stakeholder pressure, competitor pressure and buyer/end-consumer pressure, whereas internal green drivers (internal forces/pressures that motivate firms to implement green practices) identified include environmental commitment of firms, enhance reputation/brand image, to reduce costs and to enter foreign markets. The relevance/importance perceived by stakeholders shows that all stakeholders except Developers are more motivated internally than externally to engage in green practices. On the other hand, the important/relevant external green barriers (external forces that hinder or restricts firms from implementing green practices) identified include shortage of green professionals, shortage of green suppliers, tight and inflexible stakeholder deadlines and lack of stakeholder collaboration, whereas internal green barriers identified include high cost of implementation and lack of knowledge and awareness. The relevance/importance perceived by stakeholders shows that Developers and Suppliers perceive internal barriers more than external, while Architects/Consultants and Contractors were found to perceive external and internal barriers to be more or less the same. The study also identified several important/relevant performance measures to capture environmental, economic/cost and organisational performance that firms could operationalise to capture the benefits of green practices. With regard to actual improvement in these performances, all three performances were found to be relatively lower for Developers, while moderate to high for other stakeholders. With regard to the relationship between GSCM aspects, the extent of the impact of green drivers on green practices was found to far exceed the impact of green barriers on green practices, which self-explains the moderate extent of implementation of green practices across stakeholders. Moreover, it was found that both core and facilitating green practices have a significant and positive impact on three dimensions of performance across stakeholders, and the strength of impact, in general, ranged from moderate to high. Furthermore, facilitating green practices was found to have a strong and positive impact on core green practices. Finally, firm size and ownership was found to have a significant impact on the various GSCM aspects. The study provides practitioners (across all stakeholders) with a potential stock of core and facilitating green practices that they could implement as well as potential performance measures they could operationalise in their respective firms. Also, it helps them to gauge the green drivers and barriers affecting their green practices implementation. The understanding of relationships such as the impact of green drivers and barriers on green practices is important for both policymakers (at the sector level) and practitioners (at the firm level) to devise strategies to effectively maximise/leverage the drivers and minimise/eliminate the barriers to promote efficient and effective green practices implementation. The positive impact of green practices on all three aspects of performance demonstrates the significant “win-win” opportunities that exist for stakeholders, and should therefore provide the impetus for firms to implement green practices. Also, practitioners could use this understanding to prioritise the implementation of those individual facilitating and/or core green practices that deliver the firm’s targeted green performance goals (taking all three performance aspects into consideration). Furthermore, the finding on the impact of facilitating green practices on core green practices shows that facilitating practices is a necessary precursor to the implementation of core green practices and therefore should provide the impetus for firms to make prioritised investment in facilitating practices to improve their core green practices. Also, the findings on the impact of size and ownership are important for all concerned parties to devise actions, strategies and policy interventions to ensure all firms, regardless of their size and ownership, contribute towards greening the sector. Overall, given that most of the underlying issues in construction are similar across countries, the insights from this study can be used as a good starting point for practitioners and policymakers elsewhere in greening the construction sector. The study is arguably the first comprehensive attempt to understand GSCM and its importance/relevance in greening the construction sector. The study also provides several validated first-order constructs, namely external and internal drivers, external and internal barriers, facilitating green practices, environmental, economic/cost and organisational performance, and a second-order construct, core green practices, underlying the following first-order constructs: green design, green purchasing, green transportation, green construction/manufacturing and end of life green practices. This itself is a significant research contribution given that construct development and validation is at the heart of theory building. The study also provides a comprehensive GSCM framework underlying these constructs and their relationships. Future researchers could use/adapt this GSCM framework in their respective settings in construction or other sectors. Also, the application of several established/emerging theories to understand the various GSCM aspects has not been undertaken previously in the construction sector and hence constitutes a novelty