The decision support model presented in this paper is the result of a research project initiated by a large organisation operating in an emerging economy. The exotic business context of this company generated many reservations and questions about the applicability of traditional supply chain management models in terms of the decisions that should be made to design a supply chain. As supply chai...

Demand forecasting is one of the important activities in a supply chain which provides all the supply chain planning processes with market information crucial for efficient supply chain management. Its performance is measured by forecasting error, which is defined using the difference between forecast and actual sales. In this paper, we classify the forecasting error types based on the cases th...

The characteristics of Engineer to Order (ETO) companies are described in terms of their markets, products and the internal processes of their organisation. These are set in the context of current trends in supply chain management. The business processes associated with the procurement and marketing functions and the interactions with other processes are analysed. These are compared for a numbe...

We are experiencing a digital revolution that is rapidly changing the way business is conducted. In this new economy, information is shared speedily and many participants are collaborating. Effective and seamless collaboration between distributed supply chain members is therefore crucial. To understand how this may be done, we describe a knowledge based framework for abstracting, enriching, ana...

Although effective and efficient supply chain management requires integrated business processes that go beyond purchasing and logistics activities, some doubts are expressed concerning the applicability of supply chain integration practices. Specifically, a careful literature search reveals that no studies have included the effect of environmental uncertainty on the relationship between supply ...

The focus of logistics research and development has during last ten years shifted clearly from logistics functions towards logistics processes, and from company viewpoint to supply chain and network viewpoint. A wide array of general principles and guidelines have been presented about taking a holistic view to supply chains, integrating supply chain processes and collaborating between supply ch...

Turbulence and competitiveness define the current global business environment. Firms need to develop high quality products and services quickly and at lower costs than competitors by improving their internal operations as well as focusing on core activities while outsourcing non-core activities. This increasing competition forces firms to integrate their suppliers and customers into the overall...

Supply chain management (SCM) has become one of the most popular and fastest growing areas in management. One major issue of SCM is the proper design of supply chains to serve customers effectively (high customer service) and efficiently (at low costs). This is particularly difficult as companies nowadays face a series of challenges like shrinking product life cycles, the proliferation of produ...

Supply chain managers are trying to maximize the profitable operation of their manufacturing and distribution supply chain, but due to global competition in process industries and complexities of the supply chain processes together with large computational times, it has made optimization of supply chain management (SCM) quite difficult. Recently, Knowledge management (KM) is a new important inf...