Global Supply-Chain Strategy And Global Competitiveness

The purpose of this study is to provide an analysis of global supply chain in a broader context that encompasses not only the producing company, but suppliers and customers.  The theme of this study is to identify global sourcing and selling options, to enhance customer service and value added, to optimize inventory performance, to reduce total delivered costs and lead times, to achieve lower break-even costs, and to improve operational flexibility, customization and partner relations.   In this context, an integrated management information system will be viewed as the key instrument that captures all relevant data and makes it available to the appropriate decision-maker and that provides an optimizer and decision-support function supporting various phases of the decision-making process, requiring the identification of cost cutting and value adding strategies.  The properly integrated management information systems will help companies to gain the critical global competitive edge to survive in today's markets.  We suggest various strategies in sourcing, manufacturing/operation, and marketing that can provide a competitive global supply chain strategy for a firm to increase value.  We provide case studies where these strategies have been successful as well as case studies where they have failed.

Coordination and competition in resource-constrained channels

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 225-227).This thesis deals with five important ideas pertaining to supply chains and supply contracts: coordination, flexibility in allocating profit, the push-pull boundary, the valuation of capacity, and cooperation versus competition and its effects on profit and prices. Throughout the thesis, we focus on capacity-constrained supply channels, motivated by the fact that most real-world supply chains have physical or monetary constraints.In the first part of this thesis, we show that when a supply channel is capacity-constrained and the constraint is tight, there is a set of linear wholesale price contracts that coordinates the channel while allowing the supplier to make a profit. We prove this for the one-supplier/one-newsvendor supply channel as well as the many-supplier/one-newsvendor channel configuration (with each supplier selling a unique product). We analyze how this set of wholesale prices changes as we change the channel's capacity constraint. We also explore conditions under which these channel-efficient linear wholesale price contracts result from the equilibrium behavior of a newsvendor procurement game. Our newsvendor procurement game generalizes the Stackelberg game introduced in Lariviere and Porteus (2001) to allow for multiple suppliers as well as a capacity constraint at the newsvendor. In order to convey the worst-case channel performance when these channel-efficient contracts are not used in equilibrium, we quantify the worst-case efficiency loss for the supply channel using a distribution-free method. We also identify the set of Pareto-dominated contracts in a negotiation setting. Furthermore, unlike the unconstrained setting, we show that in the constrained setting wholesale price contracts can be flexible in allocating the channel profit without necessarily sacrificing coordination.(cont.) Finally, we find the set of risk-sharing contracts (such as buy-back and revenue-sharing contracts) that coordinate a constrained supply channel and contrast that set with the set of risk-sharing contracts that coordinate an unconstrained channel. We show that in a capacity constrained channel, even risk-sharing contracts gain extra flexibility because for any given level of risk, there is now a range of possible allocations of the system optimal profit between the supplier and retailer. (Without a capacity constraint, for any given level of risk, there is only one allowable allocation of channel optimal profit between the supplier and retailer.) In other words, in a capacity-constrained environment, using risk-sharing contracts, for any given level of risk, we show there is flexibility in allocating the channel optimal profit.In the second part of this thesis, we consider a supply channel with a capacity constraint in which the retailer makes an order quantity decision that depends only on realized demand rather than a forecast, and instead the supplier is the newsvendor for the channel making a stocking decision based on a forecast. In other words, the retailer now 'pulls' inventory from the supplier as demand is realized which differs from the model in the first part of this thesis wherein the supplier 'pushes' inventory onto the retailer before the sales season begins. We find that for the new supply channel similar results hold. Namely, when the retailer is operating in 'pull-mode', there is a set of 'pull' wholesale price contracts that coordinates the channel while allowing the retailer to make a profit. We analyze how this set of wholesale prices changes as we change the channel's capacity constraint.(cont.) We also explore conditions under which these channel-efficient 'pull' wholesale price contracts result from the equilibrium behavior of a newsvendor procurement game. Our newsvendor procurement game generalizes the Stackelberg game introduced in Cachon and Lariviere (2001) to allow for multiple retailers as well as a capacity constraint at the newsvendor. We assess the worst-case channel performance in equilibrium when these channel-efficient contracts are not selected. Furthermore, we identify the set of Pareto-dominated 'pull' contracts in a negotiation setting. Finally, we identify the wholesale price contracts that coordinate regardless of the supply chain's mode of operation.In the third part of this thesis, we consider a supply channel, operating in 'push'-mode, with multiple suppliers selling differentiated products to one newsvendor with limited capacity, using wholesale price contracts. We show that both in a negotiation setting as well as in an equilibrium setting, with the suppliers selecting wholesale prices followed by the newsvendor choosing order quantities, each supplier incurs an endogenous price for their share of the newsvendor's capacity. We intrepret this price as the value of the newsvendor's capacity and analyze the capacity's price in both a negotiation and an equilibrium setting. Furthermore, we show that our capacity valuation technique can be applied to different supply chain settings by analyzing the capacity price for a different supply chain, operating in 'pull'-mode, with one supplier with limited capacity selling differentiated products to multiple retailers. Finally, we analyze the effects of collusion on prices and profits in both these settings.by Navid Sabbaghi.Ph.D

Market efficiency and the global financial crisis: evidence from developed markets

Purpose This study aims to provide one of the first empirical investigations of market efficiency for developed markets during the recent global financial crisis. Design/methodology/approach Using the Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) country indices as proxies for national stock markets, the study conducts a battery of econometric tests in assessing weak-form market efficiency for the developed markets. Findings The inferential outcomes are consistent among the different tests. Specifically, the study finds that the majority of developed markets are weak-form efficient while the USA is the sole equity market to be commonly diagnosed as weak-form inefficient across the different tests when using full period data spanning the January 2008-November 2011 period. However, when basing the analysis on one-year subsamples over the identical time period, this study fails to reject weak-form market efficiency for all of the developed markets and presents evidence consistent with the Adaptive Market Hypothesis as described by Urquhart and Hudson (2013). When applying technical analysis for the case of the USA over the full study period, the results indicate that the return predictabilities can be exploited for some horizon of variable length moving average (VMA) trading rules. Originality/value This study provides one of the first empirical investigations of market efficiency for developed markets during the recent global financial crisis using an extended set of econometric tests. The study contributes to the existing body of empirical research that formally assesses the impact of a financial crisis on stock market efficiency and underlines the significance and relevance of examining market efficiency through subsample analysis. </jats:sec