Elements of paradoxes in supply chain management literature: A systematic literature review

This study reports the results of a systematic literature review investigating paradoxes in supply chain management. This issue is important because supply chain practitioners frequently face paradoxes in industry with little direction provided in supply chain literature. Investigating the years 1997 through 2019, we identified 64 articles as the basis of our research containing a total of 68 unique paradoxes. In identifying the paradox elements (PEs), we adopted paradox theory (PT) as the base theoretical approach, which was utilized in only 7 of the articles. We employed contingency theory, institutional complexity theory, and complexity theory to support our findings. For each paradox, we also extracted and summarized managerial insights for practitioners. This study addresses the emergent needs of investigating paradoxes in the supply chain management domain to extend the use of PT and complementary theories that can aid practitioners in how to efficiently manage the paradoxes they encounter in industry

Is the US 3PL industry overcoming paradoxes amid the pandemic?

Purpose: Third-party logistics (3PL) companies have experienced an explosion of volume during coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Special tiers have been introduced to provide differentiated levels of service to the customers. However, such changes in an organization reveal and intensify tensions known as paradoxes. The purpose of this research is to identify what paradoxes emerged or have become more salient specifically due to COVID-19 in 3PLs\u27 ground operations and how they are dealt with by ground operation managers. Design/methodology/approach: This is a qualitative study conducted in two phases. Phase one utilizes a questionnaire approach to identify the paradoxes within the 3PLs operating in the USA. Phase two, conducted six months after phase one, follows an in-depth one-on-one interview approach. NVivo 12 is employed to analyze the interview data. Findings: The results show that new paradoxes did in fact emerge due to the COVID-19 and are mostly related to the performing paradox category. Findings from in-depth interviews show that the 3PL managers focus on keeping safety as priority to manage COVID-19 related paradoxes, along with modifying operational plans, improving communication, investing in training, optimizing hub network, introducing modified/new methods and adapting modified human resource policies. Originality/value: This paper is among the first known to identify paradoxes within the 3PL operations during the COVID-19 and provides insights into how these paradoxes are dealt with at mid-management level. Findings of this study provide foundations for the development of a theoretical framework on handling paradoxes within 3PLs

Interactions in sustainable supply chain management: a framework review

Purpose – This study evaluates the research conducted among the interim, dyadic interactions that bridge the stand-alone measures of economic, environmental, and social performance and the level of sustainability, as suggested in the Carter & Rogers (2008) framework. Design/methodology/approach – This paper conducts a systematic literature review based on the Tranfield et al. (2003) method of the articles published in 13 major journals in the area of supply chain management between the years of 2010 and 2016. Results were analyzed using an expert panel. Findings – The area of research between environmental and social performance is sparse and relegated to empirical investigation. As an important area of interaction, this area needs more research to answer the how and why questions. The economic activity seems to be the persistent theme among the interactions. Research implications – The literature on the “ES” interactions is lacking in both theoretical and analytical content. Studies explaining the motivations, optimal levels, and context that drive these interactions are needed. The extant research portrays economic performance as if it cannot be sacrificed for social welfare. This approach is not in line with the progressive view of SSCM but instead the binary view with an economic emphasis. Practical implications – To improve sustainability, organizations need the triple bottom line (TBL) framework that defines sustainability in isolation. However, they also need to understand how and why these interactions take place that drive sustainability in organizations. Originality/value – This is the first study to examine the literature specifically dedicated to the essential, interim, dyadic interactions that bridge the gap between stand-alone performance and the TBL that creates true sustainability. It also shows how the literature views the existence of sustainability is progressive, but many describe sustainability as binary. It is possible that economic sustainability is binary, and progressive characterizations of SSCM could be the reason behind the results favoring economic performance over environmental and social

Optimasi Portofolio Resiko Menggunakan Model Markowitz MVO Dikaitkan dengan Keterbatasan Manusia dalam Memprediksi Masa Depan dalam Perspektif Al-Qur`an

Risk portfolio on modern finance has become increasingly technical, requiring the use of sophisticated mathematical tools in both research and practice. Since companies cannot insure themselves completely against risk, as human incompetence in predicting the future precisely that written in Al-Quran surah Luqman verse 34, they have to manage it to yield an optimal portfolio. The objective here is to minimize the variance among all portfolios, or alternatively, to maximize expected return among all portfolios that has at least a certain expected return. Furthermore, this study focuses on optimizing risk portfolio so called Markowitz MVO (Mean-Variance Optimization). Some theoretical frameworks for analysis are arithmetic mean, geometric mean, variance, covariance, linear programming, and quadratic programming. Moreover, finding a minimum variance portfolio produces a convex quadratic programming, that is minimizing the objective function ðð¥with constraintsð ð 𥠥 ðandð´ð¥ = ð. The outcome of this research is the solution of optimal risk portofolio in some investments that could be finished smoothly using MATLAB R2007b software together with its graphic analysis

Impacts of the Tropical Pacific/Indian Oceans on the Seasonal Cycle of the West African Monsoon

The current consensus is that drought has developed in the Sahel during the second half of the twentieth century as a result of remote effects of oceanic anomalies amplified by local land–atmosphere interactions. This paper focuses on the impacts of oceanic anomalies upon West African climate and specifically aims to identify those from SST anomalies in the Pacific/Indian Oceans during spring and summer seasons, when they were significant. Idealized sensitivity experiments are performed with four atmospheric general circulation models (AGCMs). The prescribed SST patterns used in the AGCMs are based on the leading mode of covariability between SST anomalies over the Pacific/Indian Oceans and summer rainfall over West Africa. The results show that such oceanic anomalies in the Pacific/Indian Ocean lead to a northward shift of an anomalous dry belt from the Gulf of Guinea to the Sahel as the season advances. In the Sahel, the magnitude of rainfall anomalies is comparable to that obtained by other authors using SST anomalies confined to the proximity of the Atlantic Ocean. The mechanism connecting the Pacific/Indian SST anomalies with West African rainfall has a strong seasonal cycle. In spring (May and June), anomalous subsidence develops over both the Maritime Continent and the equatorial Atlantic in response to the enhanced equatorial heating. Precipitation increases over continental West Africa in association with stronger zonal convergence of moisture. In addition, precipitation decreases over the Gulf of Guinea. During the monsoon peak (July and August), the SST anomalies move westward over the equatorial Pacific and the two regions where subsidence occurred earlier in the seasons merge over West Africa. The monsoon weakens and rainfall decreases over the Sahel, especially in August.Peer reviewe

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe