Increasing competitive pressures are forcing companies to increase their rates of innovation. The increasing rate of innovation shortens each product's duration in the market, thereby compressing each product's life cycle. Without proper management, increasing product turnover will increase design and manufacturing costs. More frequent product development cycles require additional product devel...

This paper addresses the problem of determining the sale price and the production quantity under supply uncertainty. The problem is commonly observed in the agricultural industry. We consider a firm that initially leases farm space in order to grow fruit. The realized amount of fruit supply fluctuates due to weather conditions, diseases, etc. At the end of the growing season, the firm makes two...

Operations Research has addressed a variety of environmental problems outside the traditional supply chain management area such as remanufacturing, reverse logistics, and waste management. Supply chain sustainability, which includes designing green supply chains, will gain much more attention in the future. Indeed, most companies are still in the early stage of considering a green initiative. T...

Traditional intra-firm cost accounting tools are not appropriate in the context of supply chain management, as there are no standards for the definition and composition of costs. This prohibits exchange and comparison of cost data among different supply chain members. Against this background, several activity-based costing models for inter-firm cost accounting have been proposed. Evaluating the...

We examine a supply base diversification problem faced by a buyer who periodically holds auctions to award short term supply contracts among a cohort of suppliers (i.e., the supply base). To mitigate significant cost shocks to procurement, the buyer can diversify her supply base by selecting suppliers from different regions. We find that the optimal degree of supply base diversification depends...

Supply chain partnership involves mutual commitments among participating firms. One example is early order commitment, wherein a retailer commits to purchase a fixed-order quantity and delivery time from a supplier before the real need takes place. This paper explores the value of practicing early order commitment in the supply chain. We investigate the complex interactions between early order ...

Cost reduction is one of the methods applied for improving the productivity of organizations. In productivity literature, particularly in nonparametric methods, cost reduction related methods are regarded as input oriented models. This paper presents a Supply Chain Management (SCM) model in which purchasing iron ore and coke from different resources, along with production and distribution of st...

The aim of this paper is to develop an optimization model for quality improvement by considering quality investment in rework policies and supply chain profit sharing. To improve product’s quality, the decision of process target and its tolerance is important since it directly affects the defective rate, manufacturing cost, and loss to customer due to the deviation of product from its specifica...

The level of a service and its cost have a trade-off relation in the supply chain, but most companies aim to achieve both quality service and low cost at the same time by means of effective supply chain management. In an effort to achieve this goal, many researches have been made to minimize the uncertainties related to the supply chain through its effective design and operation. It is notewort...

In this paper, for effective multi-echelon supply chains under stochastic and fuzzy environments, an inventory management framework and deterministic/stochastic-neuro-fuzzy cost models within the context of this framework are structured. Then, a numerical application in a three-echelon tree-structure chain is presented to show the applicability and performance of proposed framework. It can be s...