Supply chains are distributed manufacturing systems composed of various resources belonging to different companies. The configuration of the supply chain network, integrated with Internet and web-based electronic market places, is essential for business to pursue a competitive advantage. This paper develops a model describing the integrated e-supply chain network and formulates a multi-criteria...

Changing customer and business requirements force manufacturers to develop agility in order to be competitive. Agility refers to the skill to respond to these unexpected needs of the market. This paper presents the essence of agile supply chain (ASC) and contributes to the existing literature on ASC by highlighting the key research challenges and issues important to both practitioners and acade...

This paper presents an agent development methodology that utilises agile techniques to facilitate the development and implementation of multi-agent systems. We illustrate SADAAM through a worked example from the Supply Chain Management domain, and implement a partial system using the Agent Factory Framework.

Turbulent and volatile markets are becoming the norm as life-cycles shorten and global economic and competitive forces create additional uncertainty. The risk attached to lengthy and slow-moving logistics ‘pipelines’ has become unsustainable, forcing organisations to look again at how their supply chains are structured and managed. This paper suggests that the key to survival in these changed c...

Mastering both demand and supply uncertainty is a key challenge for many companies. Markets are increasingly turbulent and also the vulnerability of production and logistics processes is growing. The management of uncertainty has been addressed as an essential task of supply chain management (among others by Davis 1993 and van der Vorst & Beulens 2002). For coping with the addressed uncertainti...

In this paper, an inventory management framework and deterministic costs models within the context of this framework are structured for effective supply chain under deterministic and fuzzy environment. In this regard, we propose a bi-echelon multi-product supply chain in which a central manufacturing firm (lower echelon) with warehouse space limitation is fed through different suppliers (upper ...

This paper presents an approach to evaluate the supply chain agility behaviour consisting in the development of an integrated index, with the data gathering, transmission and processing supported by a cloud-computing environment. The proposed approach relies on the development of two agility indices: one to assess the individual company agile behaviour, and the other one to determine the same b...

Purpose – The study sets out to explore the use of an iterative approach for designing distribution chain in an agile virtual environment; in an agile virtual environment, quick adaptation to changing market situation and automation of supply chain management processes are essential. Design/methodology/approach – The iterative approach consists of two parts: the strategic model and the tactical...

1.1 What is the problem? Different management paradigms, such as the lean, agile, resilience and green have been adopted for the management of supply chains. The lean supply chain is a paradigm based on cost reduction and flexibility, focused on processes improvements, through the reduction or elimination of the all “wastes”, i.e., non-value adding operations (Womack et al., 1991). It embraces ...

Considered in the context of an industry study, “Strategic Supply” relates to any business or industry that has the potential to capitalize on more efficient and effective management of their respective supply chains. Supply Chain Management (SCM) is the integration and optimization of business process and information flows from the purchase of raw materials to the delivery, consumption, and wh...