Review of Literature and Curricula in Smart Supply Chain & Transportation

This study provides a review of existing smart supply chain management (SCM) literature and current course offerings in order to identify unexplored implications of smart SCM. Specifically, the study focuses on curricula within the state of California to derive potential opportunities for the relevant practitioners in the Bay Area. In addition, the study further extends curriculum review to other well-recognized SCM programs around the U.S. By exploring current relevant course offerings from different academic institutions for higher education (i.e., universities), this research aims to deliver general ideas useful to knowledge practitioners in fields concerning SCM. Finally, the research illustrates a conceptual framework aimed at fostering familiarity with the necessary research topics for the evolving smart SCM

Three essays on product design for the environment

Design is a powerful instrument by which the world is forged to satisfy the needs of mankind. As the awareness and pursuit of sustainability increases, we have seen the transition from “design for needs” to “design for environment”. Design for the Environment (DfE) requires manufacturers to focus on conserving and reusing resources, minimizing waste, and reducing hazard during a design process. DfE includes, but not limited to Design for Recovery and Benign by Design. Manufacturers are facing the challenge and opportunity of incorporating DfE into their businesses. Eco-conscious product design is critical for the success of businesses, and, therefore, has been an important research focus. This dissertation presents a design approach to help manufacturers maximize profits through optimal eco-conscious product design, and to seek insights for policy makers and managers into inducing product design for the environment. The focus of this dissertation is the interaction between product design for the environment with market segmentation, inter-divisional coordination, and regulatory policies. This dissertation presents two studies on Design for Recovery. The first study analyzes the effects of remanufacturable product design on market segmentation and trade-in prices. By identifying the system and market parameters under which it is optimal for a manufacturer to design a remanufacturable product, the study demonstrates that entering a remanufactured-goods market in and of itself does not necessarily translate into environmental friendliness. In addition, this study develops and compares several measures of environmental efficiency, and concludes that emissions per revenue can serve as the best proxy for emissions as a metric for measuring overall environmental stewardship. The second study investigates the impact of decentralization of manufacturing and remanufacturing operations within a firm on product design, pricing, and profitability, and seeks inter-divisional incentive mechanism to achieve firm-wide coordination. This study shows that decentralization and divisional conflict not only result in lower firm profit and product sales, but also create a hurdle for remanufacturable product design. Thus, an inter-divisional incentive mechanism is suggested to facilitate coordination between two profit-maximizing divisions. The study signifies a two-part coordination scheme (a transfer price and a fixed lump sum), through which a decentralized firm can achieve first-best total profit and production quantity; in addition, the manufacturing division is incentivized to design new products to be remanufacturable. The last study focuses on Benign by Design. In this essay, an innovative pharmaceutical company decides whether to adopt green pharmacy in response to the regulatory policy of the pharmaceutical stewardship and/or patent term extension, as well as the competition from a generic company. One the one hand, the patent term extension can encourage the innovative company to invest in green pharmacy, and the regulator can induce green pharmacy with short extended term when market competition is intensive. On the other hand, a pharmaceutical company will neither go green nor bear all the compliance cost in the presence of the take-back regulation because the compliance cost is traditionally independent of the choice of green pharmacy. Results show that although adding the take-back regulation on top of the patent term extension generally reduces firm profit and requires a longer term extension, such combined policy can excel the single policy of patent term extension under certain circumstances. In addition, a modified take-back policy that associates compliance cost with the firm's choice of green pharmacy is better than the patent term extension when the competition intensity is relatively high

Applications of open innovation to the supply chain system in the SMEs

The close-knitted structure of a supply chain seems to leave no room for the word \u27open\u27. Closeness builds trust, enables information sharing, benefits transportation and more. Somehow, openness started to benefit supply chain management recently, through a trend called \u27open innovation\u27. Based on gathered anecdotes and our interviews of industry professionals, we attempted to present a more complete picture of open innovation in supply chain management, including its potential benefits, major concerns, adoption hurdles, and future solutions. Our findings identified current perceptions of supply chain practitioners on open innovation and major hurdles and difficulties of implementing open innovation in supply chain functions other than just product development. Our research contributed to the current literature of open innovation by updating its implementation status, identifying adoption and implementation issues, and proposing strategic considerations within the context of supply chain management

Distribution Channel Choice and Divisional Conflict in Remanufacturing Operations

We consider a firm consisting of two divisions, one responsible for designing and manufacturing new products and the other responsible for remanufacturing operations. The firm will sell these new and remanufactured products either directly to the consumer (direct selling) or through an independent retailer (indirect selling). Our study demonstrates that a firm’s organizational structure can affect its marketing decisions. Specifically, a decentralized firm with separate manufacturing and remanufacturing divisions can benefit from indirect selling with higher firm profit, supply chain profit, and total consumer demand than direct selling. Moreover, this structure also induces a remanufacturable product design. In contrast, a centralized firm in which the manufacturing and remanufacturing divisions are consolidated is intuitively better off by choosing direct selling than indirect selling. Furthermore, we show that, surprisingly, when the focal firm sells through an independent retailer, a decentralized internal structure can result in higher supply chain profit than a centralized internal structure. We further investigate the case of dual dedicated channels and conclude that, while direct selling of remanufactured products and indirect selling of new products can better induce a remanufacturable product design and higher supply chain profit, it is not in the best interest of the firm in terms of total sales and firm profit

The quest for carbon-neutral industrial operations: renewable power purchase versus distributed generation

Integrating renewable energy into the manufacturing facility is the ultimate key to realising carbon-neutral operations. Although many firms have taken various initiatives to reduce the carbon footprint of their facilities, there are few quantitative studies focused on cost analysis and supply reliability of integrating intermittent wind and solar power. This paper aims to fill this gap by addressing the following question: shall we adopt power purchase agreement (PPA) or onsite renewable generation to realise the eco-economic benefits? We tackle this complex decision-making problem by considering two regulatory options: government carbon incentives and utility pricing policy. A stochastic programming model is formulated to search for the optimal mix of onsite and offsite renewable power supply. The model is tested extensively in different regions under various climatic conditions. Three findings are obtained. First, in a long term onsite generation and PPA can avoid the price volatility in the spot or wholesale electricity market. Second, at locations where the wind speed is below 6 m/s, PPA at $70/MWh is preferred over onsite wind generation. Third, compared to PPA and wind generation, solar generation is not economically competitive unless the capacity cost is down below$1.5 M/MW

Supply chain coordination with two-part tariffs under information asymmetry

Supply chain coordination literature indicates that two-part tariff contracts cannot coordinate a supply chain with a supplier and a retailer under information asymmetry, but can coordinate the channel under full information, while leaving the retailer zero profit. Motivated by the practice of Costco Business Centres, we incorporate customer heterogeneity, near-saturated retail market and asymmetric information into a stylised model. The retailer has the knowledge of customer heterogeneity while the supplier does not. The supplier, on the other hand, designs a menu of two-part tariffs for the retailer to choose from. We have found that two-part tariffs can coordinate the supply chain under asymmetric information, while leaving the retailer a positive profit. In addition, a one-size-fits-all two-part tariff can coordinate the supply chain at equilibrium, i.e. there is no need for the supplier to design different two-part tariffs for the retailer who may possess different types of information

Effects of Remanufacturable Product Design on Market Segmentation and the Environment

Despite documented benefits of remanufacturing, many manufacturers have yet to embrace the idea of tapping into remanufactured-goods markets. In this article, we explore this dichotomy and analyze the effect of remanufacturable product design on market segmentation and product and trade-in prices by studying a two-stage profit-maximization problem in which a price-setting manufacturer can choose whether or not to open a remanufactured-goods market for its product. Our results suggest that it is optimal for a manufacturer to design a remanufacturable product when the value-added from remanufacturing is relatively high but product durability is relatively low and innovation is nominal. In addition, we find that entering a remanufactured-goods market in and of itself does not necessarily translate into environmental friendliness. On the one hand, the optimal trade-in program could result in low return and/or remanufacturing rates. On the other hand, a low price for remanufactured products could attract higher demand and thereby potentially result in more damage to the environment. Meanwhile, external restrictions imposed on total greenhouse gas emissions draw criticism in their own right because they risk stifling growth or reducing overall consumer welfare. Given these trade-offs, we therefore develop and compare several measures of environmental efficiency and conclude that emissions per revenue can serve as the best proxy for emissions as a metric for measuring overall environmental stewardship

Green product design with competition and fairness concerns in the circular economy era

In this paper, we consider green product design in a supply chain consisting of one manufacturer and two retailers, where retailer 1 aims at monetary profit maximisation, and retailer 2 has fairness concern. We consider two kinds of green products: a marginal-intensive green product (MIGP) and a development-intensive green product (DIGP). For the former, the green investment cost depends on the green level and the production quantity; while for the latter, the green investment cost depends on the green level solely. In each case, we investigate the impact of the retailer’s fairness concern by comparing the optimal solutions and supply chain performance with those in the basic models in which all the supply chain members aim at profit maximisation. We find that retailer 2 will set a higher retailing price and earn a smaller market share. Such inferiority increases as retailer 2’s inequity aversion increases or as the substitutability degree of the products offered by the two retailers increases. We also find that retailer 2’s fairness concern will always harm the manufacturer. If an equity outcome is achieved, the supply chain may achieve a better performance; however, if an inequity outcome is attained, the supply chain always performs worse