What it takes to design a supply chain resilient to major disruptions and recurrent interruptions

Global supply chains are more than ever under threat of major disruptions caused by devastating natural and man-made disasters as well as recurrent interruptions caused by variations in supply and demand. This paper presents an optimization model for designing a supply chain resilient to (1) supply/demand interruptions and (2) facility disruptions whose probability of occurrence and magnitude of impact can be mitigated through fortification investments. Numerical results and managerial insights obtained from model implementation are presented. Our analysis focuses on how supply chain design decisions are influenced by facility fortification strategies, a decision maker’s conservatism degree, demand fluctuations, supply capacity variations, and budgetary constraints. Finally, examining the performance of the proposed model using a Monte Carlo simulation method provides additional insights and practical implications

A resilient and sustainable supply chain: Is it affordable?

Developing environmentally and socially sustainable supply chains has become an integral part of corporate strategy for virtually every industry. However, little is understood about the broader impacts of sustainability practices on the capacity of the supply chain to tolerate disruptions. This article aims to investigate the sustainability-resilience relationship at the strategic supply chain design level using a multi-objective optimization model and an empirical case study. The proposed model utilizes a sustainability performance scoring method and a novel programming approach to perform a dynamic sustainability tradeoff analysis and design a “resiliently green” supply chain

Key lessons from the implementation of ERP in Canada

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is the integrated management of core business processes, of-ten in real-time and mediated by software and technology. ERP gives us an integrated and updated image of core business processes based on common databases retained by a database man-agement system. ERP systems are able to track business resources including cash, raw materials, production capacity and the status of business commitments such as orders, purchase orders, and payroll. This paper presents different experiences of the implementation of ERP in Canada

Sustainability Analysis under Disruption Risks

Resilience to disruptions and sustainability are both of paramount importance to supply chains. This paper presents a hybrid methodology for the design of a sustainable supply network that performs resiliently in the face of random disruptions. A stochastic bi-objective optimization model is developed that utilizes a fuzzy c-means clustering method to quantify and assess the sustainability performance of the suppliers. The proposed model determines outsourcing decisions and buttressing strategies that minimize the expected total cost and maximize the overall sustainability performance in disruptions. Important managerial insights and practical implications are obtained from the model implementation in a case study of plastic pipe industry

Supply Chain Greening versus Resilience

The relationship between supply chain resilience and environmental sustainability (greening) has been a topic of peripheral discussion in the research literature. The aim in this paper is to investigate, from a supply chain modeling perspective, the extent to which supply chain greening and resilience strategies are supportive of each other. A strategic supply chain design model is introduced that utilizes an environmental performance scoring approach and a new robustness measure, called “elastic p-robustness”, to (1) explore the relationship between greening and buttressing (building resilience), and (2) identify potential tradeoffs to develop “resiliently green” and “greenly resilient” supply chains. Utilizing real data from a multinational apparel company, our analyses and investigations arrive at important practical implications and managerial insights and set the stage for additional research in this area

Knowledge management and social media: A scientometrics survey

The purpose of this research is to study the role of the social media for knowledge sharing. The study presents a comprehensive review of the researches associated with the effect of knowledge management in social media. The study uses Scopus database as a primary search engine and covers 1858 of highly cited articles over the period 1994-2019. The records are statistically analyzed and categorized in terms of various criteria using an open source software package named R. The findings show that researches have grown exponentially during the recent years and the trend has continued at relatively stable rates. Based on the survey, knowledge management is the keyword which has carried the highest citations followed by social media and social networking. Among the most cited articles, papers published by researchers in United States have received the highest citations, followed by United Kingdom and China

Big data and social media: A scientometrics analysis

The purpose of this research is to investigate the status and the evolution of the scientific studies for the effect of social networks on big data and usage of big data for modeling the social net-works users’ behavior. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the studies associated with big data in social media. The study uses Scopus database as a primary search engine and covers 2000 of highly cited articles over the period 2012-2019. The records are statistically analyzed and categorized in terms of different criteria. The findings show that researches have grown exponentially since 2014 and the trend has continued at relatively stable rates. Based on the survey, decision support systems is the keyword which has carried the highest densities followed by heuristics methods. Among the most cited articles, papers published by researchers in United States have received the highest citations (7548), followed by United Kingdom (588) and China with 543 citations. Thematic analysis shows that the subject nearly maintained an important and well-developed research field and for better results we can merge our research with “big data analytics” and “twitter” that are important topics in this field but not developed well

The Application of Technical Analysis in Stock Price Forecasting: Non-linear Probability Models and Artificial Neural Networks

Stock price forecasting is one of the main challenges in stock market which investors and analysts are faced with. To forecast the future prices and future trend, different tools have been used among which we can refer to technical and fundamental analysis. It is noticed that technical analysis has good performance in short-time forecasting. Hence, in this paper, technical analysis has been used to estimate the probability function of stock prices. To forecast the direction of stock price movement in the following day, artificial neural networks (ANN), Logit, Probit, and extreme value models are utilized. To evaluate the performance of proposed models, daily values of Iran Khodro company stock are considered as a real case study. The nonparametric test of equality of ratios shows that the difference between the forecasting results of different models is not statistically significant. However, according to forecasting error criterion, the Probit model is more efficient than other mentioned models

A closed-loop supply chain network in the edible oil industry using a novel robust stochastic-possibilistic programming

In recent years, the complexity of the environment, the intense competition of organizations, the pressure of governments on producers to manage waste products, environmental pressures and most importantly, the benefits of recycling products have added to the importance of designing a closed loop supply chain network. Also, the existence of inherent uncertainties in the input parameters is another important factor that the lack of attention them can affect the strategic, tactical and operational decisions of organizations. Given these reasons, this research aims to design a multi-product and multi period closed loop supply chain network model in uncertainty conditions. To this aim, first a mixed-integer linear programming model is proposed to minimize supply chain costs. Then, for coping with hybrid uncertain parameters effectively, randomness and epistemic uncertainty, a novel robust stochastic-possibilistic programming (RSPP) approach is proposed. Furthermore, several varieties of RSPP models are developed and their differences, weaknesses, strengths and the most suitable conditions for being used are discussed. Finally, usefulness and applicability of the RSPP model are tested via the real case study in an edible oil industry

Designing a Supply Chain Network under the Risk of Disruptions

This paper studies a supply chain design problem with the risk of disruptions at facilities. At any point of time, the facilities are subject to various types of disruptions caused by natural disasters, man-made defections, and equipment breakdowns. We formulate the problem as a mixed-integer nonlinear program which maximizes the total profit for the whole system. The model simultaneously determines the number and location of facilities, the subset of customers to serve, the assignment of customers to facilities, and the cycle-order quantities at facilities. In order to obtain near-optimal solutions with reasonable computational requirements for large problem instances, two solution methods based on Lagrangian relaxation and genetic algorithm are developed. The effectiveness of the proposed solution approaches is shown using numerical experiments. The computational results, in addition, demonstrate that the benefits of considering disruptions in the supply chain design model can be significant