Integrators in supply chain

Wal-Mart, in 2008 sourced goods worth US 30 billion from China (Bliss and Haddock 2008). Wal-Mart is now rapidly adding new stores for sales in China. Home Depot acquired HomeWay in China to grow Home Depot s sales in China, although it has been sourcing large volumes of products from China. 

A supply chains is usually structured as a linear vertical chain, or an integrated chain. The vertical supply chains can be designed for specific products or customers, leading to a large number of supply chains. This would require operating a large number of independent supply chains, with implied redundancies. The 

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According to Santoso et al. (2005), a supply chain is a network of suppliers, manufacturing plants, warehouses, and distribution channels organized to acquire raw materials, convert these raw materials to finished products, and distribute these products to customers. Van der Vorst et al. (2005) extends this to a food supply network, referring to an interconnected system with a large variety of complex relationships such as alliances, horizontal and vertical cooperation, forward and backward integration in supply chains. 

Puigjaner, L., Espuna, A. (2006). Integration in Supply Chain Management, (pp. 695-730). In Computer Aided Product and Process Engineering WILEY. 

Finally, an interesting trend in supply-chain management is improving business practices by providing capabilities to improve service for customers. One such concept is capability to promise. The idea is not just to ensure that the product is available, but that the supply chain is capable of delivering the product. This involves, for instance, capability to rapidly change the schedule to accommodate the customer order and interact with the active plant schedule. Such a system was developed at Celanese Fibers, which is integrated with a Customer Order System and enabled via a Web browser. 

Gunasekaran A, Ngai EWT (2004) Information systems in supply chain integration and management. European Journal of Operational Research 159 269-295... 

S. S. Pitty, W. Li, A. Adhitya, R. Srinivasan, and I. A. Karimi, 2007, Decision Support for Integrated Refinery Supply Chains. 1. Dynamic Simulation, Computers and Chemical Engineering (In Press). 

Advances in Logic-Based Optimization Approaches to Process Integration and Supply Chain Management... 

The objective of this chapter is to provide an overview of new developments in dis-crete/continuous optimization with applications to process integration and supply chain management problems. The emphasis is on logic-based optimization which is becoming a new promising area in process systems engineering. 

Advanced manufacturing research (AMR), a market-analysis company that specializes in supply chain technology, estimates that there wiU be a 48% compound annual growth rate for supply-chain management software until 2003. That wiU put annual sales of these integrated suites at nearly 19 billion. Transportation management systems, with 1998 sales of 314 million, are expected to reach 1.9 billion by 2003 (Forger 1999). 

Supply chain decisions may conflict each other that requires coordination and integration through supply chain to optimize the processes in it globally. 

A model for a more general supply chain structure and requirement will be introduced to illustrate medium range integrated planning and scheduling in supply chains. The model is adopted from Kreipl and Pinedo [5]. 

The models have different modehng approaches. One approach deals with independent models at each stage hnked with the objective function and/or delivery requirement. The other is the integrated approach in which the whole chain is considered as a single production unit. Both approaches use traditional scheduling models as a base for modeling in supply chains. 

They reveal that facility location problems mostly include inventory and production decisions as well while routing, transportation mode selection, and procurement integrated location decision problems receive less attention in the literature. Facility location decisions are strategic in supply chain design since a company supply chain will need to adapt to changing market needs migrating to new locations for example. They also state that most of the facility location studies consider minimization of costs as the objective. 

Barriers to Using the Internet in Supply Chain Integration... 

Lummus Vokurka, 1999 Tracey Smith-Doerflein, 2001 Kerrin, 2002 Interdependency in supply chain SC integration/collaboration SC inter-organization collaboration... 

Forza Venelli, 1997 Interdependency of activities/works in supply chain Quick response/ integration requirement... 

Neuman Samuel, 1996 Hoek, 1998 Hoek et al., 2001 Interdependency in supply chain Integration across and between interfaces using performance measurement approach to control SC... 

The chapter identifies and categorizes the sources of IT threats in supply chains through a laige-scale survey of companies across various supply chain functions. The authors aigue that the integration of information flows facilitates supply chain collaboration and also increases supply chain risks. The authors suggest that in order for supply chain collaboration to succeed, the benefits of IT integration must exceed the increase in supply chain risk affected by IT. 

While we are not aware of any hard data to support this assertion, many within the operations research community have argued that one of the reasons for the success of decision support models in supply chain management is the fact that ERP systems have made available the (previously unavailable) data that these models require. This is certainly quite possible. In addition, many stand-alone decision support systems make use of data from ERP systems, but are not integrated with the ERP system and not viewed as ERP decision support systems. This would therefore clearly be an indirect ERP benefit. 

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