Quality Management in Multi‐Level Supply Chains with Outsourced Manufacturing

Outsourcing stretches supply chains longer with added contract manufacturers responsible for the manufacturing of parts and final products. Should a firm change its quality management approach as its supply chain becomes longer with outsourced manufacturing? This paper studies a brand owner's optimal choice between two commonly used quality management approaches: an inspection‐based approach and an external failure‐based approach, in two supply chains – a dyadic supply chain and a multi‐level supply chain where the brand owner outsources manufacturing to an independent contract manufacturer. Our study finds that the brand owner's optimal choice between the two quality management approaches could be opposite in the two supply chains. Specifically, we show that if agency costs exist between the contract manufacturer and the brand owner, the brand owner may prefer an inspection‐based approach in the multi‐level supply chain in contrast to preferring an external failure‐based approach in the dyadic supply chain. In particular, inspections can be effective for the brand owner to limit the manufacturer's profit by excluding defective finished products and components, which in turn reduce agency costs in the multi‐level supply chain. Hence, the efficiency of an inspection‐based approach relative to an external failure‐based approach can be higher in the multi‐level supply chain as compared to the dyadic one. Our findings suggest that firms should adjust to changes in supply chain structures and re‐evaluate the efficiencies of different quality management approaches accordingly.     

Managing Demand Uncertainty through Core Acquisition in Remanufacturing

We discuss the optimal raw material acquisition strategy for a third party remanufacturer (3PR). We specifically investigate whether a 3PR should acquire used products or cores in bulk with uncertain quality levels, or in sorted grades with known quality levels; and whether to acquire and remanufacture cores before the demand is realized (planned acquisition), or after the demand is realized (reactive acquisition), or on both occasions (sequential acquisition). When only sorted cores are acquired, we find that, (i) it is optimal to acquire cores in multiple grades to balance acquisition and remanufacturing costs; (ii) if reactive acquisition is possible, it reduces the assortment size (number of grades in which cores are acquired) and the total inventory acquired in the planned acquisition; and (iii) the optimal portfolio of grades to acquire and the optimal acquisition and remanufacturing quantities of these grades can be determined analytically. When bulk cores are acquired in addition to sorted cores, the property of reduction in assortment size of the planned acquisition is preserved. We also show that the 3PR should acquire only a fraction of the demand in planned acquisition, and leave the rest for reactive acquisition. This fraction changes during the lifecycle of a remanufactured product. Using a combination of empirical and realistic data from a smartphone remanufacturer we show that sequential acquisition increases expected profit by up to 8% and 27% over only planned and only reactive acquisitions respectively, and reduces the inventory acquired by up to 21% over only planned acquisition.     

Investment in Shared Suppliers: Effect of Learning,Spillover, and Competition

We investigate the optimal strategies for firms to invest in their suppliers when the benefits of such investments can spillover to other firms who also source from the same suppliers. We consider two Bayesian firms that can invest in improving the quality of their shared supplier; the firms do not have complete information on the true quality of the supplier, but they update their beliefs based on the supplier's performance. We formulate the problem as an investment game and obtain Markov perfect equilibria characterized by the investment thresholds of both firms. The equilibrium investment strategies of the two firms are characterized by a region of preemption and a region of war of attrition. We also examine how the interplay between spillover, competition, and returns from the investment at shared suppliers affect the investment threshold and the time to the leader's investment, and identify the conditions under which competition delays or hastens the first investment in a shared supplier.     

浅谈如何强化应收账款的日常管理

应收账款是企业流动资产的重要组成部分,企业必须加强对应收账款的日常管理。本文从实施应收账款的追踪分析、认真对待应收账款的账龄、不断完善收账政策和建立应收账款坏账准备制度等方面提出了强化应收账款日常管理的措施。     

Oiling the wheels? Flexible labour markets and the migration industry

ABSTRACT

The growing commercialisation of migration, often through a multiplicity of labour market intermediaries, is an issue of increasing academic interest. We seek to contribute to an emerging research agenda on the migration industries by exploring how one of the key actors that constitutes it, recruitment agencies, sits at the nexus between flexible labour market structures and migrant labour. Interviews with U.K. labour providers and low-wage employers form the evidence base for an analysis of the strategies developed by recruiters to derive commercial gain from connecting the so-called ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ sides of the flexible international labour market. We seek to contribute to understandings of the analytical categories within migration systems by illustrating how the migration industry interacts with other key stakeholders to structure international migration.     

关于经济发展与人口状况科学管理的思考

自从20世纪70年代以来,我国大陆举国上下认真贯彻计划生育的基本国策,终于取得了30年少生3亿多人、使得13亿人口日的到来推迟了4年的巨大成绩。此举促进了国内的经济发展,同时也为全球的人口总量的控制做出了贡献。但是,由于我国人口的基数太大,目前我国的人口状况依然存在着影响经济发展的不容乐观的问题。因此,在新的历史条件下,只有坚持与发展我国的控制人口数量、提高人口质量的基本国策,加强对人口的科学管理,才能实现经济与社会的协调发展。     

The Inherent Politics of Managing the Quality of Urban Green Spaces

Although the term ‘quality’ has a universal positive connotation and typically is framed by a focus on improvements, its application includes as well as excludes the access, values and world views of particular actors and interests. In this article, we highlight the relevance and implications of such ‘inherent politics’ through a case study of a widespread approach to operationalizing quality in urban green space management. We conclude that adoption of any quality model has both limiting and enabling implications for public participation and decision-making and that a critical stance is needed within both research and practice for the development of quality models that connect to values of broader societal relevance.     

Capacitated qualification management in semiconductor manufacturing

In semiconductor manufacturing, machines are usually qualified to process a limited number of recipes related to products. It is possible to qualify recipes on machines to better balance the workload on machines in a given toolset. However, all machines of a toolset do not have equal uptimes and may further suffer from scheduled and unscheduled downtimes. This may heavily impact an efficient recipe-to-machine qualification configuration. In this paper, we propose indicators for recipe-to-machine qualification management based on the overall toolset workload balance under capacity constraints. The models, deployed in industry, demonstrate that the toolset capacity must be considered while managing qualifications. Industrial experiments show how capacity consideration leads to an optimal qualification configuration and therefore capacity utilization.     

Disaster Management from a POM Perspective: Mapping a New Domain

We have reviewed disaster management research papers published in major operations management, management science, operations research, supply chain management and transportation/logistics journals. In reviewing these studies, our objective is to assess and present the macro level “architectural blue print” of disaster management research with the hope that it will attract new researchers and motivate established researchers to contribute to this important field. The secondary objective is to bring this disaster research to the attention of disaster administrators so that disasters are managed more efficiently and more effectively. We have mapped the disaster management research on the following five attributes of a disaster: (1) Disaster Management Function (decision‐making process, prevention and mitigation, evacuation, humanitarian logistics, casualty management, and recovery and restoration), (2) Time of Disaster (before, during and after), (3) Type of Disaster (accidents, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, landslides, terrorism and wildfires etc.), (4) Data Type (Field and Archival data, Real data and Hypothetical data), and (5) Data Analysis Technique (bidding models, decision analysis, expert systems, fuzzy system analysis, game theory, heuristics, mathematical programming, network flow models, queueing theory, simulation and statistical analysis). We have done cross tabulations of data among these five parameters to gain greater insights into disaster research. Recommendations for future research are provided.     

基于系统动力学第三方直通集配中心模式研究

采用定性分析与系统动力学建模定量研究相结合的研究方法,首先对供应链库存管理的第三方直通集配中心模式做了较为系统的分析和界定;其次,建立了第三方直通集配中心模式下的供应链系统动力学模型;最后,对第三方直通集配中心模式供应链库存管理案例进行了仿真分析,证明了该模式相对分散式VMI模式的比较优势,并对第三方直通集配中心的运营策略提出了优化建议.