Search results

This paper is to explore how cross-functional integration (CFI) of production-marketing can impact the firm's build-to-order (BTO) competitiveness, marketing performance (MP) and financial performance (FP).

Empirical study with the structural equation modeling approach is applied. Six hypotheses are constructed and tested based on survey data collected from Chinese manufacturing firms.

The survey data supports that production-marketing integration (PMI) improves BTO competitiveness (BTOC) and MP and that BTOC also positively affects marketing outcome which, in turn, impacts a firm's FP. The results reveal that CFI of production-marketing is an effective approach for achieving the BTO manufacturing strategy and can improve organizational performance.

The paper uncovers the role of CFI of production-marketing in BTO manufacturing strategy and its impacts on a firm's MP and FP and provides important managerial implications for practitioners to improve organizational time-based competitiveness and performance in today's time-based competition era.

Vehicle manufacturer “CarCo” has spent decades developing its supply strategy based on customer ordered production. Yet the combination of an over‐crowded European market and the need to grow sales poses a dilemma: what strategy does it adopt to manage its global operations? This research aims to examine the implementation of responsive operations and supply strategy to analyse how and why a firm's strategy changes over time.

Based on the observations from a two‐day workshop held for 50 managers at the firm's headquarters, the paper explores theoretical and practitioner implications for the continued development and implementation of build‐to‐order (BTO) as a cornerstone of supply strategy.

Despite considerable capability at functional and business level, CarCo must address corporate and industry factors in order to raise responsiveness. Managers understand the conflict between operational and supply strategies presented here, yet are limited in the extent they can act on this knowledge due to the multi‐level aspect of strategy and difficulties over control beyond the boundary of the firm.

Key performance indicators need to be modified to gauge individual sale profitability, alongside new incentives and measures to overcome demand distortion and supplier game‐playing. Further, the balance between flexibility investment and better customer fulfilment should be explored through cost analysis.

Presents a managerial perspective of supply chain strategy development, analysed through a structured academic lens. The paper illustrates the increasingly dynamic nature of supply chains and the importance of connections between retail distribution, manufacturing, and in‐bound supply as part of the global operation.

The current spate of mergers and acquisitions activity may end in expensive failure unless companies pay closer attention to the operational issues involved in integrating enterprises. A supply‐chain operations reference model exists to support meaningful assessment.

This research aims to analyze the potential of revenue management in the German car industry. The concept offers the chance for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to be more customer‐oriented to reduce costs and increase earnings. To implement revenue management, criteria are required to segment the customers. The car configuration changes and the delivery time look suitable in this context and this paper aims to analyze these.

Survey analysis was conducted with 2974 German buyers of new cars. The respondents recently bought a car or were in the planning process of doing so. A total of 803 data sets could be evaluated statistically using SPSS software. Descriptive statistics and mean test were utilized to test several hypotheses and find out distinctions between the respondents.

The results show that German car buyers could be segmented in to different groups according to the criteria: delivery time and configuration changes. This enables manufacturers to introduce revenue management and realize benefits in better customer orientation and improved supply chain planning.

This research shows that German OEMs, especially the premium OEMs overestimate the value of change flexibility and short delivery times for their customers. The implementation of revenue management could help to reduce complexity and offer each customer the appropriate degree of change flexibility and the optimal delivery time combined with a process‐ and effort‐adequate pricing.

The concept of responsiveness has been widely discussed, yet so far most of this discussion has remained qualitative in nature. The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual model identifying the key factors that determine the responsiveness of a supply chain system, which – once quantified – provide a unique profile of each supply chain setting towards the appropriate supply chain strategy.

The paper reviews existing contributions and synthesises these into a conceptual model of responsiveness. The model is applied using three case studies from the automotive and electronics industry. The case research is based on value stream mapping, semi‐structured interviews, and site visits.

Three key findings could be established: first, the concept of responsiveness has a simple logic that aligns itself to a wide range of manufacturing strategies. However, underlying this remit is a complex interaction of an array of key variables, and it was found that previous contributions largely have only addressed a subset of these. Second, these key variables can be grouped into three categories or dimensions of responsiveness – product, process and volume – to provide a holistic understanding of responsiveness and its key determinants. Third, due to the large involved, there cannot be one single “holy grail” concept of how responsiveness can be achieved, neither does one single approach apply to entire sectors.

A great variety of variables needs to be considered in order to provide a balanced view of all three dimensions of responsiveness, thus the case analyses remain at a necessarily high level.

The paper provides guidelines for management on how to align their supply chain strategy to volume, product and process contingency factors in order to balance responsiveness to customer demand and supply chain efficiency.

The paper aims to elevate a discussion that previously has been held mostly at a conceptual level beyond the qualitative description, and thus addresses a key shortcoming in the current debate.

The purpose of this study is to survey knowledge management (KM) practices and to examine the applications and technologies adopted when developing the knowledge management system (KMS) in build‐to‐order supply chains (BOSC).

This paper uses a literature review of research articles from 1996 to 2007 with keyword indexes to survey the KM practice, KMS technology and its application in BOSC. Such keyword indexes include: BOSC, SCM, KM, KMS, expert system, knowledge‐based system and information system on the Elsevier online database, ScienceDirect, EBSCO, Proquest, Emerald, DOAJ, and Wiley Inter Science. A total of 1,500 articles were found but only 149 articles related to the keywords of KMS application and KM practices within SCM and BOSC.

The important findings indicate that the KMS application is solely focused on single knowledge problem for enabling individual SC members to attain operational excellence. There is a need for further research into the development of KMS with features of knowledge coordination that cross organizational borders in attaining the BOSC integration.

Perhaps, the limitation of this study was the narrowness of the scope of the paper based on the keywords used for searching.

Validation of the multi‐disciplines of KM practices and KMS applications provides enterprises with useful guidelines for implementing KM‐ and KMS‐related projects within their current BOSC practices.

This paper provides useful knowledge by highlighting the characteristics of KMS technology within BOSC and empirical insights into the relationship between KM and BOSC practices.

The aim of this paper is to propose a simulation study of the “steel supply chain” to demonstrate the effect of inventory management and demand variety on the bullwhip effect mitigation.

The relevant literature is reviewed, and then the simulation model proposed.

This study identifies reasons for sharing information under varying levels of demand and some variants, and demonstrates the benefits of mitigating the bullwhip effect by applying a design of experiment. It is shown that the information sharing is able to mitigate the bullwhip effect in the steel supply chain by extending the order interval and minimising the order batch size.

This study explores the factors associated with the bullwhip effect. This research is focused on built‐to‐order simulation, so the results are only oriented on the basis of orders; hence a simultaneous order‐ and forecast‐based steel supply chain should be carried out in the future.

This framework is expected to provide a convenient way to measure the optimum inventory level against a limited level of demand uncertainty, and thus enterprises can promote the supply chain coordination.

An innovative simulation model of the “steel supply chain” is proposed, which includes information sharing in the simulation model. Furthermore, dynamic scheduling is shown by applying a continuous ordering and order prioritization rule to replace traditional scheduling methods.

While the concept of supply chain responsiveness (SCR) has received considerable attention in the operations management literature, mostly under the auspices of concepts such as build‐to‐order, mass customisation, lean and agility, so far there is a lack of comprehensive definition of SCR, as well as a defined relationship between “responsiveness” and “flexibility”. Also, the frameworks at hand tend to consider only a subset of factors previously identified in the literature, and thus do not comprehensively portray the cause‐and‐effect relationships involved. This paper aims to address these gaps.

The paper synthesises the existing contributions to manufacturing and supply chain flexibility and responsiveness, and draws on various related bodies of literature that affect a supply chain's responsiveness such as the discussion of product architecture and modularisation.

Four types of responsiveness are identified: product, volume, mix, and delivery, all of which can relate to different time horizons, and can be present as either potential or demonstrated responsiveness. It is argued that a supply chain can feature different levels of responsiveness at different tiers, depending on the configuration of the individual nodes, as well as the integration thereof. Furthermore, a holistic framework is proposed, distinguishing between requiring and enabling factors for responsiveness, identifying the key relationships within and between these two categories.

The definition and framework proposed provide novel insights into the concept of SCR as well as a clear terminology that will inform future research. The framework developed in this paper is suitable for both qualitative and holistic quantitative studies.

In addition to a detailed review of the factors associated with SCR, a generic definition of responsiveness is developed. The paper proposes a definition of four types of responsiveness which will support further empirical studies into the concept and its application. Furthermore, a holistic framework is developed that allows for cause‐and‐effect relationships to be investigated and dependencies to be identified.

This paper aims to explore the current state of research on supply chain flexibility (SCF) and mass personalization (MP) to identify the literature findings to date, research gaps and to provide guidelines for future research in this area.

A systematic literature review of 64 papers was undertaken to address the use of SCF as a productive response to MP environments. The methodology used is made up of five steps: formulation of the research questions, identification of studies, selection and evaluation of studies, analysis and synthesis and presentation of the results.

Three main research topics have been identified: personalization levels and flexible processes in supply chain, where flexible processes in supply chain are analysed as a productive response to high levels of MP; supply chain collaborative processes for SCF and MP, where product co-creation and relationships between supply chain members is analysed; and SCF and MP enabling technologies, in which technologies to support MP implementation and SCF are considered. Each of these three main topics have been divided into research lines and research sublines that allowed identifying a positive relationship between the SCF and the MP strategies.

Systematic literature review is a methodology reliable and recommended by a large number of scientific papers. However, it depends on available and accessible research studies and the researcher’s criteria. The selection of certain criteria for inclusion and exclusion of papers introduces publication bias, which should be considered an intrinsic limitation to systematic literature review.

The main literature findings in each research line and subline related to the SCF-MP relationship are identified and analysed. Furthermore, research gaps and further research lines in the SCF-MP area are highlighted. The information presented in this paper improves the literature on the advances in the SCF use as a productive response to MP environments.

The purpose of this paper is to present an approach to effective supply chain management by understanding the dynamics between various enablers of agile supply chain. Today’s business environment is characterized as a highly competitive, dynamic and volatile market. Agile supply chain is seen as the winning strategy to be adopted by manufacturers bracing themselves for dramatic performance enhancements to become national and international leaders.

Using interpretive structural modeling the research presents a hierarchy-based model and the mutual relationships among the enablers of agile supply chain.

The research shows that there exists a group of enablers having a high driving power and low dependence requiring maximum attention and of strategic importance, whereas another group consists of those variables which have high dependence and are the resultant actions.

This classification provides a useful tool to supply chain managers to differentiate between independent and dependent variables and their mutual relationships which would help them to focus on those key variables that are most important for building cost-effective and agile supply chains.

Presentation of enablers in a hierarchy and the classification into driver and dependent categories is unique effort in the area of agile supply chain management.