UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    THREE ESSAYS IN HUMANITARIAN OPERATIONS: PREPARATION AND RESPONSE TO DISASTERS
    (2024) Sabol, Matthew; Dresner, Martin; Evers, Philip; Business and Management: Logistics, Business & Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Three essays related to humanitarian operations are examined. The first essay addresses the impact of humanitarian operations on recovery from disasters. Event study methodology is used to demonstrate the economic impact of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disaster recovery operations on economic recovery. The second essay examines how political considerations can impact government response to natural disasters. Based on theories of public choice and congressional dominance, models are formulated and fixed-effects regressions are used to examine the impact of political alignment and control on government-led humanitarian response. The third essay provides a comparative analysis among four inventory management methods used to prepare for humanitarian operations, under conditions of uncertain demand. Demands for key materials are simulated, based on data from the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), relevant to humanitarian operations. General propositions are formulated for inventory managers in preparation for humanitarian operations.
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    THE INVENTORY ROUTING PROBLEM WITH THIRD PARTY LOGISTICS
    (2012) Sadrsadat, Hadi; Haghani, Ali; Civil Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    There are two key planning issues in supply chain: inventory management and transportation. In this research, the inventory control and transportation of syrup concentrate and final products for one bottling company working for a beverage company is studied. Operation of most of beverage companies is based on a franchised distribution system. In this operation, syrup concentrate is produced by a beverage company and sold to bottlers. Bottlers, in turn, mix the syrup concentrate with different ingredients to produce various products and distribute them to retailers. Unsatisfied orders have several harmful effects on the bottling company. The bottling company may not satisfy all demands due to its small fleet size, which is not able to cover all deliveries in the right timeframe. One method for preventing missed orders is sending orders to some retailers in advance to hold for future use. This allows the fleet to be free to service the rest of the retailers. This policy is possible if those retailers have available capacity to keep products. Another way to deal with this problem is by renting vehicles, which increases the fleet size. The last option for delivering to a retailer when the owned fleet is not able to do so is outsourcing shipping and/or warehousing. The bottling company contracts with a Third Party Logistics Provider (TPLP), who is responsible for delivery of final products to some of the bottler's retailers. Also, TPLPs can store commodities in their warehouses and deliver products to retailers at the right time if there is no available capacity in the bottler's warehouses. This problem belongs to Inventory Routing Problem (IRP) with some new features such as options for rental vehicle and TPLPs. IRP is a well-studied problem in Operation Research but most of the studies take a single period into account. In contrast, the proposed model in this study includes several time steps in which a decision in one time step can affect future time steps. The proposed model is a multi-tier, multi-plant, multi-warehouse, and multi-product model which considers non-homogeneous fleet. No model in the literature considers all of these characteristics simultaneously. In this research heuristic methods are developed to solve large problems for which optimization packages cannot find even a feasible solution. Two heuristic methods are proposed for this problem, which are based on fix-and-run algorithm. Three improvement phases are also developed to enhance the final solution of heuristics. The proposed heuristic methods in this research can find an appropriate feasible solution with only a small gap from an upper bound and in reasonable running time.
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    The Impact of Globalization on Inventory and Financial Performance: A Firm-Level and Industry-Level Analysis
    (2009) Han, Chaodong; Dresner, Martin E; Dong, Yan; Business and Management: Logistics, Business & Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation investigates how globalization affects inventory and financial performance from both firm and industry perspectives. Drawing upon elements from classic inventory models, transaction costs, geographic economics, and international business and strategy literatures, this dissertation aims to contribute to the construction of a theory of global supply chain management through an empirical testing of hypotheses on the effects of global sourcing, exports and manufacturing offshoring (i.e., foreign subsidiaries) on inventory performance and financial performance, using data from multinational firms and U.S. manufacturing industries. Motivated by the lack of empirical research on inventory management in a global context, and an uncertain relationship between globalization and financial performance reported in the international business and strategy literature, the first essay examines how globalization affects firm financial performance directly and indirectly through inventory management. Globalization is further examined by a two-dimensional measure: global intensity and extensity. Due to increased uncertainties associated with global supply chains, globalization may significantly increase firm inventory levels. Even though manufacturing offshoring may benefit multinational firms through economies of scale and geographic diversification, escalating transaction costs and shrinking arbitrage opportunities may overwhelm benefits and lead to reduced financial performance. This direct-indirect effect model is tested using a large panel dataset of thousands of multinational firms over 1987-2007, collected from the COMPUSTAT global and segment databases. Essay 1 contributes to the supply chain management literature by providing a two-dimensional measure of globalization: foreign market penetration (depth) and geographic expansion (breadth), and may enhance our understanding of global supply chains. The second essay analyzes the impact of global inbound and outbound supply chains on inventory performance within the U.S. economy. This research argues that global activity (i.e., global sourcing and exports) has offsetting effects on domestic inventory levels: an increasing impact due to risk considerations and a decreasing impact due to cost pressure from rising inventory costs. According to location theory, rooted in geographic economics, and "new trade theory" on intra-firm trade, firms may be able to efficiently allocate inventories to low cost regions along their global supply chains. To the extent that allocative efficiency may only be realized once a certain level of global activity is reached, it is hypothesized that the impact of international trade on domestic inventory is inverted-U shaped. i.e., as globalization increases, inventory levels first increase due to the longer and more complex supply chains, then decrease as firms determine how to more efficiently allocate their inventory across borders. The hypotheses are tested using inventories at all three stages (raw materials, finished goods and work-in-process inventory) and industry operating data from U.S. manufacturers over the period 1997-2005. Regression results indicate a strong invert-U shaped relationships existing between import intensity (measured by imported raw materials as a percentage of industry total cost of materials) and raw materials inventory in days of supply, and between export intensity (measured by exported finished goods as a percentage of total value of industry shipments) and finished goods inventory in days of supply. Essay 2 makes two contributions: theoretically, it is the first effort to connect international trade with inventory performance; empirically, results based on all U.S. manufacturers over a recent nine-year period may provide a benchmark for management when designing global inventory strategy. In summary, this dissertation comprehensively investigates the impact of global supply chains on inventory performance and financial performance in the context of multinational firms and U.S. domestic manufacturers and hence is expected to enhance our understanding of global supply chain management theory and practices.