Long-term agreements

Lever Brothers, since it had to decide how to obtain the sodium citrate, had another host of alternatives to consider. It could produce or buy the product. If it chose to produce the builder, it could purchase the process from another firm or it could develop its own process. It could make the product from basic raw materials or from intermediate compounds. If it decided to let some other firm be the producer, it could buy the material on the open market or enter into a long-term agreement with another company. It might even do both by forming a joint company, such as Dow Coming, that would manufacture the builder. It could even buy a company that was currently producing it. All these possibilities must be economically evaluated to determine the best course of action to take. 

During the negotiation of such a transfer of ownership, the careful review of all leases is a critical factor that is often overlooked. A lease refers to a long-term agreement to use or rent a fixture, a piece of equipment, the physical structure in which the pharmacy is located, or the land the business occupies (Gagnon, 1996). 

The power generated at Modesto is sold to Pacific Gas Electric Company. Oxford has a long-term agreement with the utility to provide electric power. In 1989, the buy-back rate was 8.3 cents per kilowatt hour. 

Although nearly any combustible fuel can be used as a source of Fischer-Tropsch synthesis gas, coal is by far the most common. A long-term agreement made prior to construction made available a supply of natural gas at 0.05 per thousand cubic feet for the Carthage Hydrocol Company plant. With greatly increasing demand for natural gas, however, it is unlikely that plants producing purely synthetic liquid fuete will be based tai natural gas in the United States. New supplies of natural gas at the well are currently about 15-20 cents per thousand cubic feet, and the price will inevitably continue to increase. 

In achieving lean supply conditions, both buyer and supplier are encouraged to collaborate in identifying opportunities for cost reduction. Embedded in TQ and JIT philosophies, this approach focuses on long-term agreements as the basis for identifying improvement areas. Primary aims are to ensure that appropriate product value is delivered to the customer, that required volume is maintained, and that margin contribution is not eroded. 

Table 2 shows that the preferred contract type was the one roimd contract. Nevertheless, participants kept signing short terms contracts with the same persons. Hence the short-term contract becomes a long-term agreement with the possibihty of dissolution or renegotiation. The behaviour of the participants in the different games is similar. In round zero they tried both contract types and then they keep signing one round contracts. 

Of course, there needs to be a close collaboration with suppliers. However, as collaboration is based on long-term agreements it would have a negative impact on flexibility, because reconfiguring the supply chain is much more difficult when collaboration specifications are binding. 

We can achieve a lead time for an order in three different ways. In the first place, the firm and the client may have a long-term agreement according u> which the lead time of the order is fixed, the so-called fixed lead times. This inq)lies that every time a client orders a certain item, the lead time for the order will be the same. In the second place, the firm can offer the client a lead time for the order, to which the client can agree or disagree, the so-called firm-initiated lead time. And in the third place, clients can ask the firm for a certain lead time fm an order, the client-initiated lead time. The firm can refuse the order with this lead time or accept it... 

On March 24, 1999, Secretary of Energy Richardson and Minatom Minster Adamov signed agreements, in conjunction with the signing of a commercial contract between Russia and three major uranium companies, that will provide for the stable long term sale of Russia s natural... 

Under different types of agreements, short- and long-term projects are undertaken in close alignment to customer needs. Joint projects are meant to discover and synthesize new molecular entities designed for specific functions, discovery new and more efficient approaches to the synthesis of target molecules, and characterization of components of complex organic mixtures. 

CO conversion and product distribution were investigated. The experimental data used for the fitting were collected in two different long-term runs of the unit previously described, adopting a new batch of catalyst each time. The reproducibility of the results obtained in the two runs was checked by comparing the catalyst reactivity at standard conditions. A good agreement was found in terms of both CO conversion and product distribution (data not reported). 

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