The past two decades have witnessed a radical movement from vertically integrated supply chains towards globally decentralized supply chains. With the advancements of information technologies and reduced barriers in global trade, supply chains are expanding in a way that retailers can buy products from a larger collection of suppliers, and suppliers can sell to a larger group of retailers at di...

This paper develops a two-stage model to consider a franchise/franchisee environment in which supply chains are simultaneously entering the untapped market to produce either identical or highly substitutable products and give franchise to franchisees. Customer demand is elastic, price dependent and customer utility function is based on Huff gravity rule model. The supply chains, in the first st...

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to investigate the nature of the humanitarian aid supply chain and discuss the extent to which certain business supply chain concepts, particularly supply chain agility, are relevant to humanitarian aid. Design/methodology/approach – The paper identifies elements of good practice in conventional business supply chains and applies them to the humanitarian...

The planning and management of supply chains require properly specifying the participating members and the relationships among them. Construction supply chains usually consist of numerous participants and are complex in structure. Representing construction supply chains using a network model can help understand the complexity, support re-configuration, identify the bottlenecks, and prioritize c...

Reverse supply chains (RSCs) have been increasingly implemented in recent years to manage the growing flow of solid waste generated by end-of-life (EOL) products and minimise their environmental impact. Furthermore, research has shown that implementation RSCs benefits job creation, enables savings raw materials, creates income from sales re-manufactured products. However, designing requires dea...

Sustainability issues have driven many industries to close the loop in their supply chains (SCs), evolving into a more complex process, with risks due circular or multi-circular structure several reverse flows of goods/parts/materials. Moreover, levels integration between partners and digitalisation Closed Loop Supply Chains (CLSCs) are still low, yet benefits for society vitally relevant. Enab...

This paper explores the differences between demand and supply uncertainty in multi-echelon supply chains. Our central premise is that the insights gained from the study of one type of uncertainty often do not apply to the other. In fact, the two types of uncertainty are in a sense mirror images of each other, in that the optimal strategy for coping with supply uncertainty may be exactly opposit...

This paper proposes an agent-based simulation model to study how competition and collaboration affect supply chains by looking at the problem at a market level. A theory-driven approach is applied to the modelling. The model reflects customers, manufacturers, and suppliers competing and collaborating in a supply chain strategic space. Preliminary results show that the market structure is determ...

Challenges to effective Supply Chain Management Today’s supply chains operate in an era of a ‘new normal,’ characterized by unprecedented volatility, uncertainty and complexity. These are caused by uncertainty in macroeconomic, geo-political, and climatic conditions, as well as growth in product and service personalization levels. These factors contribute to the inability to anticipate the effe...

The mapping and analysis of supply chains is a technique increasingly used to address problems in the food system. Yet such supply chain management has not yet been applied as a means of encouraging healthier diets. Moreover, most policies recommended to promote healthy eating focus on the consumer end of the chain. This article proposes a consumption-oriented food supply chain analysis to iden...