in today's globalization, an effective integration of production and distribution plans into a unified framework is crucial for attaining competitive advantage. this paper addresses an integrated multi-product and multi-time period production/distribution planning problem for a two-echelon supply chain subject to the real-world variables and constraints. it is assumed that all transportations a...

inventory control is one of the most important issues in supply chain management. in this paper, a three-echelon production, distribution, inventory system composed of one producer, a set of wholesalers and retailers is considered. costumers' demands can be approximated by a normal distribution and the inventory policy is a kind of continuous review (r, q). in this paper, a model based on ...

supplier selection is one of the most important activities of purchasing departments. this importance is increased even more by new strategies in a supply chain, because of the key role suppliers perform in terms of quality, costs and services which affect the outcome in the buyer’s company. supplier selection is a multiple criteria decision making problem in which the objectives are not equall...

Modem competitive scenario necessitates the achievement of strategic fit between competitive and supply chain strategies, for effective and economic response in filling customer's orders, by a manufacturing enterprise. Towards this end, all the decisions (strategic, planning and operational) with regard to supply chain ought to be in conformity with strategic fit zone along cost efficiency and ...

The literature on the value of information sharing within a supply chain is extensive. The bulk of the literature has focused on two-level supply chains that supply a single product. However, modern supply chains often have more than two levels and supply many products. Because many of these products are variants of the same base product, they tend to be substitutes and their demands correlated...

This paper addresses integration issues in supply chain, and tries to investigate how different aspects of integration are linked with some product features. Integration in this study is interpreted as "internal", "upstream" (supply), and "downstream" (demand). Two features of product innovative and quality are considered. To examine the relationships between supply chain integrations – as ment...

Designing a logistic network is a strategic and critical problem that provides an optimal platform for the effective and efficient supply chain management. In this research, we address the application of fuzzy sets to design a multi-product, multi-period, closed-loop supply chain network. The presented supply chain includes three objective functions: maximization of profit, minimization of deli...

the health industry’s supply chain is full of uncertainty and unpredictability. thus, building an intelligent system to effectively capture the requirements of customers and help manage the supply chain is very important. despite artificial intelligence widespread acceptance as a decision-aid tool, ai has seen limited application in supply chain management. to fully exploit the potential benefi...

during recent years, determining appropriate strategy in the supply chain has become an important strategic issue. however, the nature of these decisions usually is complex and unstructured. to determine the best supply chain strategy, many quantitative and qualitative attributes such as cost, responsiveness and flexibility can be taken into account. in order to approximate the human subjective...

providing wider variety of products often leads to higher complexity in the manufacturing and business system. finding appropriate methods and techniques to manage these difficulties is going to be an attractive topic for researchers in operations management. by adopting a qualitative approach we have investigated the product variety management in the apparel supply chain. the main contribution...