Strategic flexibility

The sales strategy needs to decide what product to be sold in which sales market representing the sales location in the value chain network. New markets needs to be evaluated for their attractiveness and the own competitive position with respect to existing products or the capabilities in the development of new products for the respective demand. Sales business rules include decisions on the strategic share of contracted business volumes vs. flexible spot business volumes. These business rules often depend on sales channels and frame contracts with customers. The sales strategy can be matched with classical marketing mix decisions on products, prices, promotion and communication, as well as sales channel decisions. 

In analogy to the demand side, procurement contracts are fixed by quantity and price with the objective to ensure a basis volume of raw materials. Spot procurement supports company s flexibility requirements and the company can decide the spot procurement quantity with certain flexibility around the offered quantity. Price levels for contracts and spot business differ and are volatile in each period. Typically, companies operate with few key strategic suppliers for a respective product or raw material. Therefore, price-quantity models like in sales planning are less applicable. More often is the case that specifically commodity-type raw materials are procured on many-to-many exchanges, which is out of the scope in our case as described in section 3.2.6. If products are supplied by internal business units, transfer prices are applied following the contract procurement principles. 

In this case, the availability of HTTP and HTML resources greatly simplifies the strategic design problem. The tactical decisions of how to implement HTTP services for use by HTML clients (and other services) are discussed here. The primary goals of universality, flexibility and longevity led to an unexpected but very usable result. 

Depending on the severity of the hypertension, treatment with antihypertensive drugs proceeds strategically in a specific order. It is understood that this order should be flexible and open to alternative ways, but a few general principles must be adhered to. 

The flexibility in the petrochemical industry production and the availability of many process technologies require adequate strategic planning and a comprehensive analysis of all possible production alternatives. Therefore, a model is needed to provide the development plan of the petrochemical industry. The model should account for market demand variability, raw material and product price fluctuations, process yield inconsistencies, and adequate incorporation of robustness measures. 

The use of mathematical programming models on an enterprise-wide scale to address strategic decisions considering various process integration alternatives yields substantial benefits. These benefits not only materialize in terms of economic considerations, but also in terms of process flexibility and improvements in the understanding of the process interactions and systems limitations. 

Norton, L.C. and Grossmann, I.E. (1994) Strategic planning model for complete process flexibility. Industrial el Engineering Chemistry Research, 33, 69. 

Because of their relatively large size, the heterocycles covered in this section display a natural tendency to possess heavily buckled, frequently flexible frames except in cases where bridging and/or strategically located unsaturation, such as the presence of triple bonds and/or trans double bonds, impart a certain degree of skeletal rigidity which quite often results in substantial molecular flattening. 

Beckman SL (1990) Manufacturing flexibility The next source of competitive advantage. In Moody PE (ed) Strategic Manufacturing. Dow-Jones Irwin, Homewood, pp 107-132... 

It had to transform a medley of contradictory organizational concepts into a structure that allowed both fast and flexible operation in a changing global market environment and strategic alignment towards common value creation goals ... 

On the sourcing side, the slow but steady reduction of fuel and basic raw materials will induce further cost pressure on production. These can only be tackled through flexible and optimized production systems based on concepts that take purchasing power, the supply-demand balance, and strategic orientation into account. 

The key theme of this three day international conference is the role the PVC industry can play in creating a sustainable future. Papers are divided into nine sessions Strategic direction Challenges and markets PVC profiles Flexibles Polymerisation Sustainability Processing Stabilisers Additives... 

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