One of the important decisions which impacts all firms’ activities is the supplier selection problem. Since the 1950s, several works have addressed this problem by treating different aspects and instances. In this paper, a combined multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) technique (EA-PROMETHEE) has been applied to implement a proper decision making. To this aim, after reviewing the theoretica...

The paper introduces and discusses definitions and concepts from the supplier relationship management area. This review has the goal to provide readers with the basic conditions to understand the market mechanisms and the technological developments of the SRM market. Further on, the work gives a picture of the actual business environment in which the SRM vendors are in, and the main trends in t...

The use of VMI at Wal-Mart on a large scale has attracted a great deal of attention in the industrial world. In a VMI program, the supplier assumes control of the inventory management for one or more retailers (Fry, 2002). The supplier monitors the inventory level at the retailers and makes the decisions related to the quantities of replenishment and the timing of shipments to the retailers. It...

An enterprise network is analyzed from the viewpoint of an end-product manufacturer who receives customer orders and organises his production and supply policy so as to minimize the sum of his average holding cost and average stock-out cost. For each main component to be ordered, the producer has several possible suppliers. The arrivals of customers’ orders are random and delivery times from su...

This paper studies a finite horizon, single product, periodic review inventory system with two supply nodes. Supply nodes are differentiated by their fixed and variable costs, delivery lead times, as well as constraints on the order sizes. The buyer faces interesting tradeoffs: Procuring from one of the supplier, referred to “onshore supplier”, involves a high variable cost but a shorter delive...

This paper explores the influences of two internal factors, i.e. supplier team’s IT-based skills and communication with client’s team, and two contextual factors, i.e. supplier team’s understanding of client’s culture and collaboration with client’s team, on knowledge processes and performance in global sourcing of IT services from the Chinese provider’s perspective. Knowledge processes are cha...

This study proposes twooptimizationmathematicalmodels for the clustering and selection of suppliers. Model 1 performs an analysis of supplier clusters, according to customer demand attributes, including production cost, product quality and production time. Model 2 uses the supplier cluster obtained in Model 1 to determine the appropriate supplier combinations. The study additionally proposes a ...

In this dissertation, we explore problems in two areas of Supply Chain Management. The first relates to strategic supplier management. The second focuses on tactical decisions on inventory and pricing during inter-generational product transition. In many industries, manufacturing firms use multiple competing suppliers in their component or product sourcing strategy. Chapter 2 studies optimal hi...