Operations and supply chain management

Abstract

Operations and Supply Chain Management are necessary cornerstones for any organization that wants to compete in the current global economy. Traditionally, supply chains have been seen as operational structures that produced and distributed products to different market places geographically disperse around the globe. Organizations were mainly concerned with the satisfaction of their costumers at a minimum cost. In parallel supply chain research communities tended to focus on sub-sets of the associated management decisions instead of looking in a cross-functional and co-coordinated way to the different existent levels of decisions within the supply chain. This paradigm is however changing and advances in global competition, with a parallel exhaustion of natural resources and increased society awareness towards environment, created a new way of thinking when managing supply chains and operations. Companies are now realizing new business opportunities associated with a life cycle approach to their products. The need of seriously exploring the concept of global sustainable supply chains within a collaborative perspective is seen as a goal to improve companiespsila revenue growth and costumerpsilas recognition. Optimized structures and practices are being adopted while accounting concurrently with economical and sustainable issues. In support of such decisions operations and supply chain optimization as well as associated sustainable issues have been receiving a rising attention by both academic and industrialists. But a large amount of work is still to be done and a number of related issues is still therefore to be explored. The International Engineering Management Conference, Europe 2008 focus on the area of operations and supply chains with a special emphasis on supply chain optimization and sustainability. Fifteen papers were accepted containing a wide variety of methodologies and applications where some of these issues are explored.