The Book Supply Chain

The printing industry has annual revenues of over 210 billion. In the book supply chain, book printing is a 5 billion industry. The typical book supply chain operates as follows ([76]) Authors work with publishers to create content, who in turn place orders with printers. Printers print the physical books and ship them to wholesalers in full truckload quantities. These larger loads received at wholesalers undergo break bulk (i.e., they are broken down into smaller shipments) at their fulfillment centers. Bookstores order books from the wholesalers and then manage retail sales. As an example, Ingram Book Company, a wholesaler, processed over 115 million books through eleven fulfillment centers to serve 

000 outlets and accounts for one-third of all units shipped through wholesalers ([76]). 

The top five printers constitute over 40% of the printing market volume. Printing economics dictate the use of large presses that can print 

000 copies of a 250-page book in two hours with about one hour to set up the press. An average of 1 billion trade books is purchased in the United States. Of these, 50% are backlist books (i.e., published in previous years). The other 50% of the demand consists of orders for the 

000 current titles, i.e., released that year. The average new title sells fewer than 10,000 copies over its lifetime. With 25,000 publishers and 

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The book supply chain involves the printer, the wholesaler, the retail store, and the customer. Ownership of this supply chain is fragmented, with each entity s success based on different metrics. For printers to be competitive, they must have large-volume press runs that economize printing costs. Capacity decisions are made by retailer and wholesaler and determine the level of inventory and lead time to satisfy demand. Coordination between wholesaler and retailer depends on the flexibility offered for books to be returned from the retailer to the wholesaler. At the store level, competitiveness requires a large variety of books to be in stock, the flexibility for the customer to browse books before purchase, accessible locations, and other factors. The wholesaler has to be flexible to accommodate bookstore returns. The flexibility to return books provides the incentive for the bookstore to order efficient quantities from the supply chain. 

Effective assessments will be possible only through close co-operation along the materials supply chain. This approach is, however, of only limited use unless it is taken in parallel with a more realistic assessment of the real potential for exposure of consumers to these substances. The traditional approach is to use a series of worst-case assumptions which, whilst workable for most intentionally added substances, becomes um-ealistically onerous for these traces of non-intentionally added substances. The need for realistic exposure assessment and a description of some of the tools now emerging to facilitate this is covered elsewhere in this book. 

This book introduces state-of-the-art supply chain management topics keeping it brief enough for novice readers and deep enough for researchers in the field. The book adopts both management and optimization paradigms. 

In Muthu s recent book by Woodhead publications (Muthu, 2014), he comprehensively reviews the methods used to calculate environmental impact of textile and clothing supply chain, including product carbon footprints, ecological footprints, and life cycle assessment. The book presents information about the textile supply chain, its environmental impact, and an overview of the methods (greenhouse gas emissions, the water and energy footprints of the industry, and depletion of resources, as weU as the use of LCA) used to measure the overall environmental impact of the textile industry. 

The goal of this book is to share the insights of what has been learned over the course of these 30 years. In this book, we do not debate the ideal supply chain or the flavor of the month. Instead, we give insights on the evolution of the processes, share the stories of success and failure, and prognosticate on the future of tomorrow s supply chains. 

To help the reader not familiar with supply chain vernacular, here we start with a definition. For the purposes of this book, we define the term supply chain as "the process of organizational alignment to effectively manage the flows of cash, product, and information from the customer s customer to the supplier s supplier."... 

In the process of writing this book in a center seat on a flight, I had a discussion with a physician. 1 was writing intently, and it piqued his interest. When I explained the premise of the manuscript, he commented, Isn t corporate social responsibility an oxymoron " He then laughed and retorted that he was not sure what was the greater obstacle, the "ox" or the "moron." I smiled. Building the responsible supply chain is certainly a paradigm shift. 

This book is designed to cover a broad range of topics in the field of e-supply chains in 14 chapters. It is primarily intended for professionals, researchers, and practitioners who want to explore/understand the concepts and principles of the e-supply chain and want to apply various e-supply chain models and systems to solve business problems. Each chapter is designed to be stand-alone, and thus readers can focus on their interested topics. 

We now describe the ATP system for a particular electronic product (denoted by EP) manufactured by Toshiba Corporation. The EP supply chain consists of multiple final assembly and testing (FAT) factories all located in Japan, which provide EPs delivered directly to domestic business customers. An ATO production framework is employed. The order promising and fulfillment process involves several thousand product models. Order sizes range from a very small number of units to a few hundred. Orders are generated by one of several sales units and are processed by a single central order processing system. The ATP system collects orders over a 1/2 hour time interval and returns commitments to the sales offices at the end of each ATP run (V2 hour interval), order commitments are booked up to ten weeks in advance of delivery. 

More recently, many supply chain management software companies such as i2 (www.i2.com) and Manhattan Associates (www.manh.com) have moved from the purely supply chain optimization solutions including demand fulfillment and transportation planning to offerings that provide many of the same capabilities as ERP vendors. Detailed discussion of supply chain operations and offerings may be found in chapter 17 and in Sections III and IV of this book. 

The Wassermann Supply Chains described earlier in this book (Fig. 10) are ideally suited for the structuring and visualization of global supply chains. There is no need to change paradigms. 

This book provides a current overview of the chemical supply chain for the 220 billion rubber industry. It reviews the present and future international economic connections and their effects on this chemical supply chain to the rubber producers, compounding ingredient manufacturers, custom mixers, rubber fabricators, molders, extruders, and others. 

Dell s ability to operate a build-to-order strategy is based partly on the modular design of many of their products but more particularly on a very high level of synchronisation with their suppliers. There is a high level of visibility across the Dell supply chain with suppliers receiving information on Dell s order book every two hours. Ahead of fhis informafion, suppliers are provided with capacity forecasts from Dell fo enable fhem fo produce af a rafe fhat is planned to match actual demand. 

Also included in the book is a chapter on how to transform the contemporary supply chain which contains descriptions of how companies have re-designed their supply chains in innovative ways in response to both external and internal drivers. 

The book delves into the transformation issues in contemporary supply chains, and extends the concepts to incorporate the emerging issues. It does so through ten chapters, divided into three sections. The first section builds the framework for transformation, while the second focuses on transforming the contemporary supply chain in terms of products, processes, supply base, procurement, logistics, and fulfillment. Section three is devoted to capturing the key issues in transforming supply chains for emerging economies, humanitarian relief, sustainability, and healthcare delivery. 

The terms supply chain and supply network both attempt to describe the way in which buyers and suppliers are linked together to serve the end-customer. Network describes a more complex structure, where organisations can be cross-linked and there are two-way exchanges between them chain describes a simpler, sequential set of links (Harland et al., 2001). We have used the terms interchangeably in this book, preferring chain to describe simpler sequences of a few organisations and network where there are many organisations linked in a more complex way. 

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