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This research presents a study on the supply chain process of an Indian apparel industry considering various parameters involved. The study aims to identify the main parameters to improve the supply chain process and develop a comprehensive structural relationship to rank them to streamline the apparel supply chain process and business environment.

The team of five experts from this apparel industry was made to give scores to multiple parameters. The TOPSIS (Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) technique is used to develop the model for eleven key parameters and then rank them.

Based on the data analysis the planning, customer and warehouse storage have emerged as top three key parameters while the non-replenishment approach, push and pull strategy and manufacturing of the product are identified as the bottom three parameters from a hierarchy level. These parameters have been ranked based on their contributing attributes in this apparel supply chain process.

The study provides an overall ranking of parameters and the implications are in the direction of helping the industry to improve its supply chain performances rather than focus only on productivity. Further, the key parameters are identified as critical inputs and show that the firms are being more proactive and well prepared comprised of the industry.

The study indicates that the key parameters are identified by this apparel brand to improve its supply chain process. The key supply chain process involves planning, manufacturing, distribution, end customer and returns logistics of the goods, etc. So, this research also provides the focused parameters on the supply chain performance received by end customer from the supplier and rank them for effectiveness and improve their overall organizational performance. It also provides a critical observation of their supply chain process improvement which includes different brand uses, strategies and approaches.

The purpose of this paper is to quantify the effect of design parameters on the bullwhip effect and dynamic responses produced by a multi‐echelon supply chain with information sharing.

Taguchi design of experiments and system dynamics simulation are used to quantify the impact of a supply chain's design parameters, including degree of information sharing, on its dynamic performance, and the interactions that occur as the parameter values are varied.

Quantified relationships between supply chain design parameters and dynamic performance, including the bullwhip effect, are presented. Two parameters in particular, time to adjust inventory error and production lead time, are shown to have a particularly strong impact on the order variance compared to other parameters. However, there are several other significant findings.

Batching and capacity constraints are common causes of the bullwhip effect, but they are not included here. Future work should quantify the impact of these.

This paper presents a systematic way for quantifying and understanding the impact of supply chain design parameters on the bullwhip effect and dynamic responses, and their interactions. The experimental results provide practical understanding for supply chain managers.

Previous studies have identified causes of the bullwhip effect but little attention has been given to quantifying their impact and interactions. This paper makes a contribution towards filling this gap, using system dynamics simulation and Taguchi design of experiments.

The adverse interactions between disruptions can increase the supply chain's vulnerability. Accordingly, establishing supply chain resilience to deal with disruptions and employing business continuity planning to preserve risk management achievements is of considerable importance. The aforementioned idea is discussed in this study.

This study proposes a multi-objective optimization model for employing business continuity management and organizational resilience in a supply chain for responding to multiple interrelated disruptions. The improved augmented e-constraint and the scenario-based robust optimization methods are adopted for multi-objective programming and dealing with uncertainty, respectively. A case study of the automotive battery manufacturing industry is also considered to ensure real-world conformity of the model.

The results indicate that interactions between disruptions remarkably increase the supply chain's vulnerability. Choosing a higher fortification level for the supply chain and foreign suppliers reduces disruption impacts on resources and improves the supply chain's resilience and business continuity. Facilities dispersion, fortification of facilities, lateral transshipment, order deferral policy, dynamic capacity planning and direct transportation of products to markets are the most efficient resilience strategies in the under-study industry.

Applying resource allocation planning and portfolio selection to adopt preventive and reactive resilience strategies simultaneously to manage multiple interrelated disruptions in a real-world automotive battery manufacturing industry, maintaining the long-term achievements of supply chain resilience using business continuity management and dynamic capacity planning are the main contributions of the presented paper.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the self-declared sustainability initiatives of the world’s four largest chocolate manufacturers (Ferrero, Mars, Mondelez and Nestlé) and the measures they take to tackle social problems within the context of establishing sustainable sourcing of cocoa in Ghana and the Ivory Coast. Global cocoa supply chains are under continuous media and public scrutiny. Recent incidents of malpractice in supply chain management have left global chocolatiers vulnerable in terms of how they deal with social issues across their global supply chain networks. Critics have argued that there is a lack of consistency and transparency between what companies say and do in upholding sustainable practices across their supply chains.

The authors draw from the sustainable supply chain literature to develop our theoretical parameters and undertake a case-based analysis of the existing sustainability practices of these chocolatiers. Using the insights from this analysis, the authors propose a conceptual framework for a rigorous comparative assessment of self-declared sustainable sourcing initiatives of global agricultural supply chains. The methodology is qualitative and the research method is a secondary-data case study.

Four main parameters were identified and used to compare self-declared initiatives, namely: social sustainability certification from respectable bodies; code of conduct for suppliers; partnerships with the primary supply chain stakeholders; and supplier collaboration programme and improvement initiatives. The case companies chosen have implemented several initiatives, but the most prominent seem to indicate the reliance on third-party certification. Not all companies adopted a supplier code of conduct. The partnerships and collaboration programmes with different associations are presented as efficient for companies as well as farmers. Improvements in the conditions of farmers are advocated as a key result.

This paper is based on self-declared secondary data. Subsequently, it is possible that the case companies did not document some practices; or that companies do not do what they claim.

This paper provides a comprehensive framework for agricultural businesses to compare their sustainability efforts and improve the performance of their supply chains, particularly those who belong to the cocoa supply chains. The proposed framework allows an assessment of initiatives at policy, strategic, tactical and operational levels to improve social sustainability of supply chains.

This paper may help companies to think more clearly about greater transparency and provide the impetus for dealing more effectively with serious social issues in agricultural supply chains such as: child labour, child trafficking, modern slavery, etc. It may also instruct consumers to better understand what companies do as part of their sustainability agenda, alongside the communication of other features of their products, such as quality.

The framework adds value by providing a novel way to systematically compile and analyse data around self-declared sustainable initiatives. Actors within agricultural supply chains can use the framework to assess and drive their sustainability efforts and practices, leading to ways to improve the social performance of their global supply chains.

This study aims to examine the interrelationship between resilience, robustness and bullwhip effect using an inventory- and order-based production control system being subjected to operational disruption in the customer demand process.

Control engineering techniques and simulation are employed for the supply chain dynamics study.

The results show that resilience and robustness are two conflicting performance characteristics and therefore, a tradeoff can be established between them. It is also observed that improvement in resilience and reduction of bullwhip effect can be achieved simultaneously through a proper selection of control parameters.

The work establishes a relationship between the resilient behavior of a supply chain and bullwhip effect.

This study evaluated the influence of the coronavirus pandemic on the healthcare and non-cold pharmaceutical care distribution supply chain.

The model involves four objective functions to minimize the total costs, environmental impacts, lead time and the probability of a healthcare provider being infected by a sick person was developed. An improved version of the augmented e-constraint method was applied to solve the proposed model for a case study of a distribution company to show the effectiveness of the proposed model. A sensitivity analysis was conducted to identify the sensitive parameters. Finally, two robust models were developed to overcome the innate uncertainty of sensitive parameters.

The result demonstrated a significant reduction in total costs, environmental impacts, lead time and probability of a healthcare worker being infected from a sick person by 40%, 30%, 75% and 54%, respectively, under the coronavirus pandemic compared to the normal condition. It should be noted that decreasing lead time and disease infection rate could reduce mortality and promote the model's effectiveness.

Implementing this model could assist the healthcare and pharmaceutical distributors to make more informed decisions to minimize the cost, lead time, environmental impacts and enhance their supply chain resiliency.

This study introduced an objective function to consider the coronavirus infection rates among the healthcare workers impacted by the pharmaceutical/healthcare products supply chain. This study considered both economic and environmental consequences caused by the coronavirus pandemic condition, which occurred on a significantly larger scale than past pandemic and epidemic crises.

The paper develops a decision-making model for supplier selection combining quality function deployment (QFD), analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). The efficacy of the model was demonstrated by applying it for supplier selection of lithium ion batteries.

The proposed methodology involved identifying customer requirements for lithium ion batteries and translating them to requisite technical characteristics using QFD. Further, separate sourcing, safety and sustainability-related supplier parameters were proposed taking into account the manufacturer's point of view. The relative weight of each parameter was then calculated using AHP, and finally, TOPSIS was used to select the best supplier.

The proposed methodology was applied to six suppliers of lithium ion batteries, and the obtained results were used to select the most and least preferred suppliers.

The obtained results cannot be generalized and are valid to the case environment. However, the proposed approach can be used for any environment related to supplier selection after capturing the corresponding parameters. The proposed approach does not restrict the number of parameters to be considered.

Many researches related to supplier evaluation are reported in literature, but few studies are available related to supplier performance evaluation for lithium ion batteries using QFD, AHP and TOPSIS. The study will provide a guideline for comparing and selecting supplier on the basis of performance in general and its application to lithium ion batteries in specific.

The objective of this paper is to investigate the impact of products' characteristics on the performance of three distribution strategies: traditional warehousing (TW), cross-docking pick by line (XDPL) and cross-docking pick by store (XDPS).

Based on a case study of an FMCG “Fast Moving Consumer Goods” company and a major French retailer, we empirically analyse the impact of the products' characteristics on the performance of the three distribution strategies. We consider a three-echelon supply chain composed of one supplier DC, one retailer DC and multiple retailer stores. The inventory at each echelon is controlled according to an order-up-to (OUT) level policy. The demand is forecasted by means of a single exponential smoothing method. A sensitivity analysis is also conducted to analyse the impact of the supply chain parameters on the comparative performance of the strategies when the parameters' values deviate from the empirical base case.

The empirical investigation shows that the use of XDPL results leads to an increase in the supply chain total cost, whereas XDPS reduces the cost. Moreover, we show that for a service-level target, cross-docking strategies should be selected for products with low variability, high shelf space, low value and short lead-time. For an inventory reduction target, these strategies should be selected for products with high demand volume. We also propose a managerial framework for choosing the right strategy for each product.

This paper fills a gap in the literature by presenting empirical results based on a real business case of a multi-echelon supply chain. Both cost and service are used to evaluate the performance of the strategies.

Our work has the limitation to ignore the transportation cost implications when selecting the right distribution strategy. Hence, including such cost in the analysis would constitute an interesting extension of this work. Moreover, our empirical analysis represents a practical rich context that makes the scope for transferability of findings learned from this article substantial. However, for the generalisability of the findings, larger datasets in the retail supply chain would be interesting to consider

This paper aims to systematically document drivers of change and the implications they will have on international supply chain management in the coming two decades.

This study was commissioned by the World Customs Organization (WCO) at the end of June 2006. Because of increased trade volumes, emerging complex supply networks and heightened security concerns, the WCO saw the need to assess future trends and drivers in supply chain management. The Delphi method was applied to identify a set of foreseeable drivers of change and to assess their predicted impact on global supply chain management in the coming ten to 20 years. Based on a literature review of 150 recent publications and interviews among 33 industry, academic and customs experts, a survey was designed and conducted to collect current and potential change drivers in global supply chains. These drivers were compiled and prioritized by an eclectic team of 12 specialists.

The main results of the study are strongly connected to strategic and operational supply chain planning for the next ten to 20 years. They are related to increased off‐shoring of operations through truly global manufacturing, characterized by its intercontinental supply of materials; increased product complexity with shorter product life cycles; increased importance of business‐to‐government networking for operational and security efficiency; introduction of new supply chain services integrating financial, physical and information flows leading to further consolidation in the logistics markets; and the overall increase in risks and vulnerabilities in international supply chains.

This paper provides a 360 degree view of the future of international supply chain management and the challenges companies will face to compete in the twenty‐first century business environment.

A well-designed supply chain performance measurement system, should account for not only the capabilities and performance attributes of the focal firm but also its supply chain partners. The purpose of this paper is to help design a system that strikes a balance between the strategic objectives of the focal firm and its supply partners vis-à-vis the requirements of supply chain performance (cost, quality, speed and customer taste).

A theoretical framework on the strategic supply chain performance measurement system is developed based on existing literature and subsequently tested using a survey on 136 successful manufacturing organizations in India. The organizations were clustered into three strategy types and compared using analysis of variance on ranks to look for differences in preference for performance parameters.

The study examined the five dimensions of the supply chain practices, namely, strategic supply/distribution network, customer relationship, internal operations, information sharing and social and environmental responsiveness. The empirical results demonstrate the inclusion of business strategy orientation in designing today’s supply chain and hence its performance measurement system. Not supported hypotheses were addressed in the light of contextual factors.

The study is confined to finding preferences of non-financial aspects of supply chain performance and tier-1 suppliers. The research helps better design and benchmark supply chain performance metrics, based on the strategic choice of the firm.

This paper highlights the shortcomings in the existing performance measurement and gaps in the existing literature in the supply chain context. Further, it gives a holistic view of strategic supply chain performance measurement design.