Search results

This paper aims to uncover the key enablers of an agile supply chain in the manufacturing sector amidst disruptions such as pandemics, trade wars and cross-border challenges. The study aims to assess the applicability of existing literature to manufacturing and identify additional industry-specific enablers contributing to the field of supply chain management.

The research methodology is comprehensively described, detailing the utilization of extent literature and semistructured interviews with mid- and top-level executives in a supply chain. The authors ensure the robustness of the data collection process and results interpretation.

The study identifies six essential dimensions of an agile supply chain: information availability, design robustness, external resource planning, quickness and speed, public policy influencing skills and cash flow management. The study provides valuable insights for industry professionals to develop agile supply chains capable of responding to disruptions in a rapidly changing world.

This study is limited by its focus on the manufacturing sector, and future research may explore the applicability of these findings to other industries. By focusing on these essential dimensions identified in the study, managers can develop strategies to improve the agility and responsiveness of their supply chains. In addition, further research may investigate how these enablers may vary in different regions or contexts.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced executives to reconsider their sourcing strategies and reduce dependence on suppliers from specific geographies. To ensure business continuity, companies should assess the risk associated with their suppliers and develop a business continuity plan that includes multisourcing their strategic materials. Digital transformation will revolutionize the supply chain industry, allowing for end-to-end visibility, real time insights and seamless integration of business and processes. Companies should also focus on creating a collaborative workforce ecosystem that prioritizes worker health and well-being. Maintaining trust with stakeholders is crucial, and firms must revisit their relationship management strategies. Finally, to maintain business leadership and competitiveness during volatile periods, the product portfolio needs to be diversified and marketing and sales teams must work in tandem with product teams to position new products accordingly.

This work contributes substantially to the literature on supply chain agility (SCA) by adding several new factors. The findings result in a more efficient and cost-effective supply chain during a stable situation and high service levels in a volatile situation. A less complex methodology for understanding SCA provides factors with a more straightforward method for identifying well-springs of related drivers. First, the study contributes to reestablish the factors such as quickness, responsiveness, competency, flexibility, proactiveness, collaboration and partnership, customer focus, velocity and speed, visibility, robustness, cost-effectiveness, alertness accessibility to information and decisiveness as applicable factors for SCA. Second, the study suggests a few more factors, such as liquidity management, Vendors’ economic assessment and economic diversity, that are the study’s unique contributions in extending the enablers of SCA. Finally, public policy influencing skills, local administration connects and maintaining capable vendors are the areas that were never considered essential for SCA. These factors have emerged as a vital operational factor during the lockdown, and academicians may consider these factors in the future to assess their applicability.

This study provides new insights for decision-makers looking to enhance the resilience and agility of their supply chains. The identification of unique enablers specific to the manufacturing industry contributes to the existing body of literature on agile supply chains in the face of disruptions.

The primary objective of this article is to examine current procurement, inventory control and management practices in modern healthcare, with a particular focus on the procurement and management of surgical supplies in a prominent public, highly specialized healthcare sector.

This study was conducted in three phases. In Phase 1, the study team interacted with various hospital management stakeholders, including the surgical hospital store, examined the current procurement process and identified challenges. Phase 2 focused on selecting items for a detailed study and collected the qualitative and quantitative details of the store department of the healthcare sector chosen. A detailed study analyzed revenue, output/demand, inventory levels, etc. In Phase 3, a decision-making framework is proposed, and inventory control systems are redesigned and demonstrated for the selected items.

It was observed that the demand for many surgical items had increased significantly over the years due to an increase in disposable/disposable items, while inventories fluctuated widely. Maximum inventory levels varied between 50 and 75%. Storage and availability were important issues for the hospital. It is assumed the hospital adopts the proposed inventory control system. In this case, the benefits can be a saving of 62% of the maximum inventory, 20% of the average stock in the system and optimal use of storage space, improving the performance and productivity of the hospital.

This study can help the healthcare sector administration to develop better systems for the procurement and delivery of common surgical items and efficient resource allocation. It can help provide adequate training to store staff. This study can help improve management/procurement policies, ordering and delivery systems, better service levels, and inventory control of items in the hospital business context. This study can serve as a pilot study to further investigate the overall hospital operations.

This study can help the healthcare sector administration develop better systems for procuring and delivering common surgical items and efficient resource allocation. It can help provide adequate training to store staff. This study can help improve management/procurement policies, ordering and delivery systems, better service levels and inventory control of items in the hospital business context. This study can serve as a pilot study to further investigate the overall hospital operations.

This study is an early attempt to develop a decision framework and inventory control system from the perspective of healthcare inventory management. The gaps identified in real hospital scenarios are investigated, and theoretically based-inventory management strategies are applied and proposed.

This paper aims to evaluate the construction supply chain (CSC) by examining its relationships with various key areas and its development, identifying gaps and outlining potential future research directions that affect the implementation of CSC standards during the timeframe of the United Nations’ “Decade of Action” plans in the past two decades.

This paper reports on a systematic literature review with bibliometric analysis that investigates publications from around the world on various aspects of CSC. These aspects include research methodology/data collection technique, inquiry mode, country-specific research, focused areas of study, the research aims and publication periods.

The findings of the study reveal that information technology, information sharing, collaboration, performance measurement and CSC configuration have received considerable attention and analysis. However, financial management, supply chain resilience, logistics, vendor managed inventory and rural CSC have been identified as significant areas that require further investigation since limited attention has been given to them in the existing literature.

CSC is a very dominant topic in the current study, but there are some limitations to it. Scopus and Web of Science databases were used to conduct the study. A future study can therefore consider papers related to other databases. As the focus was specifically dedicated to construction material SC only, the papers associated with SCs of labours and equipment have been eradicated.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first structured and systematic literature review that identifies the issues related to the CSC during the timeframe of the United Nations’ “Decade of Action” plans and proposes future research directions to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of CSC.

Effective inventory management is crucial for SMEs due to limited resources and higher risks like cash flow, storage space, and stockouts. Hence, the aim is to explore how technology and know-how can be integrated with inventory practices and impact operational performance.

The basis of the analysis was collecting papers from a wide range of databases, which included Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. In the first phase of the process, a search string with as many as nine related keywords was used to obtain 175 papers. It further filtered them based on their titles and abstracts to retain 95 papers that were included for thorough analysis.

The study introduced innovative methods of measuring inventory practices by exploring the impact of know-how. It is the first of its kind to identify and demonstrate how technical, technological, and behavioral know-how can influence inventory management practices and ultimately impact the performance of emerging SMEs. This study stands out for its comprehensive approach, which covers traditional and modern inventory management technologies in a single study.

The study provides valuable insights into the interplay between technical, technological, and behavioral know-how in inventory management practices and their effects on the performance of emerging SMEs in Industry 5.0 in the light of RBV theory.

The RBV theory and the Industry 5.0 paradigm are used in this study to explore how developing SMEs' inventory management practices influence their performance. This study investigates the effects of traditional and modern inventory management systems on business performance. Incorporating RBV theory with the Industry 5.0 framework investigates firm-specific resources and technological advances in the current industrial revolution. This unique technique advances the literature on inventory management and has industry implications.

Nowadays, in many organizations, products are not delivered instantly. So, the customers should wait to receive their needed products, which will form a queueing-inventory model. Waiting a long time in the queue to receive products may cause dissatisfaction and churn of loyal customers, which can be a significant loss for organizations. Although many studies have been done on queueing-inventory models, more practical models in this area are needed, such as considering customer prioritization. Moreover, in many models, minimizing the total cost for the organization has been overlooked.

This paper will compare several machine learning (ML) algorithms to prioritize customers. Moreover, benefiting from the best ML algorithm, customers will be categorized into different classes based on their value and importance. Finally, a mathematical model will be developed to determine the allocation policy of on-hand products to each group of customers through multi-channel service retailing to minimize the organization’s total costs and increase the loyal customers' satisfaction level.

To investigate the application of the proposed method, a real-life case study on vaccine distribution at Imam Khomeini Hospital in Tehran has been addressed to ensure model validation. The proposed model’s accuracy was assessed as excellent based on the results generated by the ML algorithms, problem modeling and case study.

Prioritizing customers based on their value with the help of ML algorithms and optimizing the waiting queues to reduce customers' waiting time based on a mathematical model could lead to an increase in satisfaction levels among loyal customers and prevent their churn. This study’s uniqueness lies in its focus on determining the policy in which customers receive products based on their value in the queue, which is a relatively rare topic of research in queueing management systems. Additionally, the results obtained from the study provide strong validation for the model’s functionality.

This paper aims to introduce a novel structure for the physical internet (PI)–enabled sustainable supplier selection and inventory management problem under uncertain environments.

To address hybrid uncertainty both in the objective function and constraints, a novel interactive hybrid multi-objective optimization solution approach combining Me-based fuzzy possibilistic programming and interval programming approaches is tailored.

Various numerical experiments are introduced to validate the feasibility of the established model and the proposed solution method.

Due to its interconnectedness, the PI has the opportunity to support firms in addressing sustainability challenges and reducing initial impact. The sustainable supplier selection and inventory management have become critical operational challenges in PI-enabled supply chain problems. This is the first attempt on this issue, which uses the presented novel interactive possibilistic programming method.

Building supply chain (SC) resilience has become a priority for many organizations, following a global increase in disruptive events. While management accounting and control (MAC) systems play a supportive role in supply chain management (SCM) decisions, little is known about the contributions offered to resilience decisions in service organizations. The purpose of this study is to examine the performance implications of MCS's impact on proactive and reactive resilience of healthcare supply chains.

This study conducted a survey of 127 public health managers via structural equation modeling. The partial least squares version 3.3.3 was used.

The results show a statistically positive impact of MAC dimensions on proactive and reactive resilience, which in turn impacts the quality, delivery speed and cost effectiveness of the health SC. However, the integration dimension had an insignificant effect on reactive resilience but a positive effect on proactive resilience.

This study examined the performance implications of MAC system dimensions and proactive and reactive resilience on operational performance in health SCs, using empirical data from only one country. Thus, generalizing the findings to include other jurisdictions may be impossible.

Healthcare managers in public health facilities should embrace the four MAC dimensions (except the integrated dimension in reactive resilience) to support information generation in SC resilience decisions.

Perhaps, the first to provide preliminary empirical evidence on the interactive effect of proactive and reactive resilience and MAC dimensions in terms of broad scope, timeliness, integration and aggregation on health SC operational performance under disruption, in the context of an emerging economy.

The purpose of the study is to analyze and measure the impact of disruption in demand which causes the bullwhip effect. The bullwhip effect impacts the performance of firm. Just like everything else, covid has had an impact on the disruption of supply chain too leading to the need of measuring the bullwhip effect of select Indian sectors. The comparison on bullwhip effect is drawn in pre- and during covid era in major sectors. The study helps to understand, analyze and measure the impact of covid and its challenges to supply chain.

The empirical study is carried out on five major select Indian sectors which have the largest market capitalization in Indian economy, namely, FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods), automobile, utility, consumer durable and IT (information technology). The disruption in the supply chain is measured in terms of bullwhip effect. The novel metric ratio of bullwhip effect is computed which is based on demand–supply mismatch and analyzed based on 10 years of observations. The data is analyzed twice, first from 2011 to 2019 (pre-covid era) and second from 2019 to 2021 (during covid era). Each time, Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) sectoral indices are used to compute the bullwhip ratio, and empirical data is collected using Prowess. The firms listed in BSE represent most of the sector. Such panel data helps us to analyze inter- and intraindustry bullwhip effect. The changes in the bullwhip effect for various BSE listed firms are analyzed pre- and during covid era. These changes are specifically studied at the manufacturer end of the supply chain. Later regression analysis is performed to study the changes required in production based on the demand. The various strategies that cause or mitigate the impact of covid in intraindustry can be derived from the study. The disruption in production is analyzed based on the disruption in demand and profit before interest and tax (PBIT).

In pre-covid era, the percentage of demand disruption was low in select sectors but not exactly zero. Covid caused the disruptions in supply chain across the globe which resulted in bullwhip effect in Indian sectors too. Yet some of the sectors were able to cope better with the situation as compared to others. In the present study, same is analyzed statistically, and results are derived for practical significance.

The empirical data is having the observations of past 10 years to analyze the pattern of demand disruption in the firms and hence the sectors. The impact of covid is studied on performance, which is analyzed in terms of PBIT. The impact of other factors (political, social, marketing policies, etc.) that may cause disruption in the supply chain of a firm is not considered in the study.

Study is unique, as it measures disruption and provides a peerless way to study the inter- and intrasectors. To analyze the impact of bullwhip effect on sector performance, it is very much required to first measure the bullwhip; this measure of bullwhip as a ratio of the slopes of demand and supply is a novel approach. The study emphasizes that the impact of covid is not the same among the firms, and hence among the sectors. Also, it is found that the impact of such adversities can be mitigated, and performance of firm can remain intact in turbulent times too.

Supply chain collaboration (SCC) benefits organizational performance (OP). Although it is complex, it is also hard to implement and measure collaborative initiatives in the field of the supply chain. This study aims to examine the role of information technology (IT) and people’s involvement in OP through the mediation of supply chain collaboration.

This study used a deductive and quantitative approach to test the research hypotheses. Data was collected from 249 supply chain professionals working at various manufacturing firms.

This research found a significant effect of IT on supply chain collaboration. Similarly, people involvement (PI) also significantly influenced the supply chain collaboration. For the mediation hypotheses, SCC significantly mediates the relationships between two independent variables (IT and PI) and OP. Furthermore, the full mediation of SCC occurred.

This study provides a framework emphasizing manufacturing firms’ practices, SCC and OP. The “people involvement” was found as a novel variable in the tested model using the resource-based view as a supporting theory. The research findings can benefit the professionals working on supply chain business processes to improve OP.

This study aims to analyse the resilience strategy utilized by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), enabling these businesses to effectively adapt their operations in response to varying conditions by providing them with essential resources. SMEs operate in marketplaces that are both dynamic and frequently tumultuous. These markets provide SMEs with a variety of obstacles, including economic ups and downs, advances in technology, evolving customer tastes and new regulatory requirements. SMEs need to create a strategic strategy to survive and grow in such situations. This strategy ought to help strengthen their resiliency and make it possible for them to make the most of emerging opportunities while simultaneously lowering the dangers.

The questionnaires adopted and adapted from previous research served as the basis for gathering the data. The manufacturing industry was polled through the use of questionnaires. To test the hypothesis, the data were analysed using Smart PLS. Through the use of closed-ended questions directed to the proprietors, managers or senior executives of SMEs, data were collected from each and every institution in the sample. Following the examination of the data by means of descriptive analysis and the presentation of several scenarios using information relating to SMEs, the findings were presented.

The ambidextrous strategies that are used by SMEs have a propensity to offer a constructive contribution to SMEs. In this study, it was discovered that ambidexterity, which is defined as the capacity to both seek and capitalise on possibilities, has a significant bearing on the organisational effectiveness of SMEs. The results showed that ambidextrous strategies have a propensity to work as mediators in interactions involving proactive resilience tactics and performance.

The research expands our understanding of how SMEs in the manufacturing sector may improve their performance by concentrating on growing their ambidextrous strategies.

This study provides a plausible explanation of two crucial management mechanisms for enhancing the sustainability of organisational effectiveness. The relationships between ambidextrous capabilities and firm effectiveness are malleable, and this study suggests that nurturing formal and informal relationships may be the key to SMEs' long-term sustainable performance. Improving the knowledge and performance of supply chain systems for SMEs in the manufacturing sector and boosting their competitiveness in domestic and international markets are the practical contributions of this study.

Our comprehension of monitoring, cooperation and innovation within social management was deepened as a result of these facts. In addition, the study conducted in the sector uncovered four essential connections that outline how managers should actively work towards lowering social risks, developing new possibilities and increasing business performance. These capacities and links, when taken as a whole, provide the foundation upon which an integrated framework and five research propositions are built.

This research offers a convincing explanation of fundamental management processes for enhancing the sustainability of organisational effectiveness. This research implies that developing formal and informal interactions may be the key to the sustainable performance of SMEs over the long run. The relationships between ambidextrous capabilities, methods and organisational effectiveness are flexible, and this study also suggests that these relationships may be shaped. The practical contributions made by this research include boosting the understanding and performance of supply chain systems for SMEs as well as the competitive power of these businesses in both local and international markets.