International Journal of Production Economics最新文献

In the hybrid closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) with diverse collectors, customers increasingly prioritize the convenience in returning end-of-life (EOL) products. This trend necessitates supply chain entities to enhance their collection service to address the intensifying competition for EOL products collection. To devise appropriate convenience and pricing strategies, we construct a hybrid game-theoretic CLSC model encompassing a manufacturer, a retailer, and a third-party collector, and we propose new collection functions that cater to varying levels of collection competition, spanning monopoly, duopoly, and hybrid competitive scenarios. Furthermore, we delve into the influence of customers' preferences or distrust towards a specific collector on the collection competition, which is caused by factors such as more convenient offline stores or unqualified recycling process. Our study first reveals that collection competition is affected by all collectors' convenience strategies, while the total collection rate is dominated by the most preferred collectors' convenience strategy. Second, both customer's preference and distrust negatively affect pricing and convenience strategies, albeit with differing effects on collection rates across various competition levels. Notably, channel distrust exerts a more substantial influence on manufacturers' and third-party collectors' strategies. Third, we also examine how competitive collection and customer behavior shape the proportion of collected products destined for different recovery options, i.e., remanufacturing and recycling, as well as the overall efficiency of recovering collected products across the entire supply chain. And channel preference plays a more positive role in enhancing the overall collection rate for the supply chain.

Digitalization has emerged as a mitigation tool for business risks. However, digitalization has not been effectively utilized because the mechanism of digitalization mitigating risks is still in the dark box. Drawing upon organizational information processing theory, we propose that digitalization reduces operational risk through internal control systems and supply chain networks (SCN). Based on the data of Chinese public firms from 2010 to 2019, we confirm that both improving internal control system quality and reducing SCN centrality are effective vehicles to help digitalization combat operational risk. Specifically, a high degree of digitalization leads to high-quality internal control systems, which, in turn, leads to low operational risk. Inversely, digitalization increases SCN centrality, which, in turn, leads to high operational risk. Furthermore, the positive mediation effect of SCN centrality is significantly more substantial than the negative mediation effect of internal control system quality. Subsequent moderating effect analysis shows that diversification does not impact the mediation effect of internal control system quality but strengthens the mediation effect of SCN centrality. This study deepens the understanding of the risk mitigation effect of digitalization and offers meaningful metrics for managers to prevent firms from suffering unexpected risks.

Category captainship is a retail category management practice where the retailer delegates certain category decisions to a vendor, known as the category captain, to leverage the vendor’s market expertise and reduce the retailer’s workload in managing the category. We examine the effectiveness of category captainship compared to traditional retailer category management, focusing on scenarios where shelf space capacity decisions are delegated to the category captain, and demand is dependent on shelf space capacity. Our study considers two competing manufacturers, each selling a substitutable product through a common retailer. We find that when the retailer’s profit-sharing ratio is sufficiently but not excessively high, category captainship can enhance profits for both the retailer and the captain manufacturer. These profit improvements are more pronounced at intermediate values of shelf space elasticity of demand. Although the non-captain manufacturer may suffer from competitive exclusion under certain conditions, “win-win-win” outcomes in profits and sales occur when the products are highly differentiated by price or shelf-space elasticity. The retailer benefits from increasing demand elasticity of shelf space and prefers to designate the manufacturer with the higher elasticity as the category captain. When the profit-sharing ratio is determined through a retailer-led bargaining framework, the retailer benefits most by negotiating sequentially with the manufacturers, inducing the manufacturer with lower bargaining power to take on the category captain role. Our findings provide valuable insights into developing category management strategies under shelf-space elastic demand.

Spatial-temporal visibility and traceability in the digital twin enable semiconductor supply chain great transparency and efficacy, but also poses challenges to information disclosure. There is growing evidence that investment in digital twin technology is becoming crucial for improving environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings and mitigating risks within a sustainable semiconductor supply chain. Nonetheless, how fairness concerns impact the decision-making processes among different stakeholders remains inadequately understood. This paper presents an analytical analysis of the dynamic strategic interplay among semiconductor manufacturers, consumers, and government regulatory agencies (GRAs) utilizing the evolutionary game model. The aim is to investigate how long-term ESG strategies and fairness-oriented behaviors respond to government incentives. The findings imply that substantial investment demands can dissuade semiconductor manufacturers from delivering ESG services, while low tax rates may lead to their complacency and a subsequent lack of investment in ESG initiatives. Meanwhile, semiconductor manufacturers are more inclined to provide ESG services when the order loss ratio is low, and the tax rate is high, with strict regulations further amplifying this probability. Furthermore, consumers valuing fairness and equity tend to give positive feedback for basic services but is critical of ESG services due to issues with transparency in digital twin technologies. Addressing these issues extends beyond the scope of market incentives alone, requiring interventions from third parties such as government regulations, policy incentives, and enhanced data security measures.

The individual research domains of assembly line balancing and feeding have received considerable attention in recent years, furthered by a continuing trend towards mass customization. This research extends the limited literature on the simultaneous consideration of line balancing and feeding while substantially broadening the scope concerning the number of assembly line feeding policies and the incorporation of facility sizing decisions. This large-scale problem is modeled using mathematical programming techniques and solved using a logic-based Benders’ decomposition. We used a combination of real-world and re-engineered data from a car manufacturer to conduct numerical experiments. The major findings reveal that integrated decision-making may lead to a substantial cost reduction of up to 20% in this case. Furthermore, the study explores subsets of feeding policies to reduce the amount of different material flows within the factory while considering their associated costs. Our findings reveal a surprising difference in the importance of individual line feeding policies, specifically identifying boxed-supply as a pivotal policy for ensuring feasibility and reducing costs.

Despite the potential of business analytics (BA) in supply chains, many firms struggle to effectively integrate and leverage BA in their supply chains, leading to underutilized data and missed opportunities for optimization. Therefore, this study utilizes an affordance perspective to study the actualization of BA affordances within supply chains. We conduct a multiple case study analysis, interviewing 28 individuals across nine companies. Our investigation uncovers a hierarchy of intertwined affordances facilitating supply chain information management, cooperation, and customer-focused solutions. Significantly, we highlight the unique influence of technology, organization, and environmental (TOE) factors in shaping affordance actualization. As a result, we argue against generic prescriptions for BA affordance actualization, instead promoting a more tailored approach informed by specific TOE factors tied to each individual supply chain. Our work advances technology affordance research by explaining affordance actualization within supply chains and highlighting the dynamic interplay between TOE factors and BA affordance actualization. Subsequently, our research offers a nuanced understanding of BA implementation, demonstrating how tailored BA strategies can enhance supply chain optimization, cooperation, and customer-centric solutions, ultimately driving value creation for supply chains.

Variables Quick-Switch Sampling Systems (VQSSs) that involve both normal and tightened inspections for lot dispositions have attracted significant attention and discussion. However, existing VQSS models exhibit limitations, particularly in their rule-switching mechanism. Practitioners may encounter situations where multiple rounds of tightened inspection are necessary to ensure submission quality when suspicions of process degradation arise. Current VQSS models do not effectively address this need. To overcome this limitation, we present VQSSG by integrating a VQSS with a generalized rule-switching mechanism and the widely used capability index C_pk. VQSSG offers practitioners the flexibility to specify the number of successive lot acceptances under tightened inspection before transitioning to normal inspection. Our research includes the derivation of operating characteristics and average sample number functions for VQSSG, based on the C_pk index. Through in-depth investigations, we construct nonlinear optimisation models to determine the optimal system design and identify distinct types and settings for VQSSG, highlighting its strengths and weaknesses. Additionally, we provide managerial insights and recommendations for the effective implementation and application of VQSSG. To validate the practicality of this system, an industrial case study is presented. This paper significantly enhances the efficiency and adaptability of sampling systems by introducing VQSSG. The findings and managerial suggestions contribute to a deeper understanding of potential real-world applications, thereby enhancing quality control and decision-making processes.

To cope with counterfeit drugs reaching consumers all over the world, pharmaceutical firms increasingly regard blockchain technology (BCT) as a promising solution to achieve drug traceability. This study proposes a game-theoretic model to investigate the impact of BCT adoption on pharmaceutical firms’ pricing and performance in a competitive market, where one firm offers a branded drug and the other offers a generic version. We consider three contrastive cases with no BCT adoption, unilateral BCT adoption of the branded drug firm and bilateral BCT adoption and characterize consumer traceability awareness, which represents the fraction of consumers sensitive to drug traceability. We find that when BCT is unilaterally adopted, a high consumer traceability awareness level may lead to either higher or lower drug prices. The bilateral adoption of BCT always benefits the generic drug firm due to the enhanced drug traceability, but may damage the branded drug firm attributed to the mitigated differentiation between the two drugs. Compared with the unilateral adoption of BCT, bilaterally adopting BCT can lead to a win-win or lose-lose outcome, depending on the trade-off of drug traceability, drug differentiation and pricing competition. In addition, the adoption of BCT improves consumer welfare when consumers hold a high level of traceability awareness.

This paper considers the problem of integrating cross-docks (CDs) into a given retail supply network with the aim of minimizing related logistics costs. These comprise transportation costs, costs for setting up and operating CDs, inventory holding and purchasing costs. We present a novel mixed integer program (MIP) for optimizing the number and locations of CDs within the supply network as well as the selection of flow type (cross-docking or direct-to-warehouse shipping) and the associated delivery pattern tailored to a specific supplier. A numerical study shows that the original problem is difficult to solve for real-sized instances using a standard MIP solver. We therefore develop a hierarchical decomposition approach that achieves cost-efficient results compared to heuristic approaches, which assume linear transportation costs. In order to demonstrate the model’s applicability to real-life instances and to gain further practical insights we conducted a case study using data from a major European retail company. In this study we found that more than 6% of related logistics costs can be saved by setting up CDs within the supply network. We also show that existing approaches in literature may lead to unfavorable results in certain settings due to an overestimation of transportation bundling effects. Extensive numerical experiments and scenario analyses provide further managerial insights into the problem characteristics.