Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item SUPPLY CHAIN RISKS, RESILIENCE AND FIRM PERFORMANCE: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY(2018) Martinez, Camil; Dresner, Martin; Business and Management: Logistics, Business & Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation’s main focus is the study of supply chain resilience. The two studies investigate the impact of supply chain geographical locations risks and supply chain resilience on performance and of supply chain risks and disruptive events in resilience strategies. Essay 1 seeks to understand the impact of supply chain resilience strategies on firm’s performance. We utilize a cross sectional data sample from 2014 containing detailed manufacturing location risk data and resilience planning at the location level for 313 publicly traded firms. We look at three supply chain resilience cultural traits, business continuity planning, inventory and financial stability. We find that resilience has a positive effect on firm performance. Essay 2 looks at the impact of two types of supply chain risks (internal and external) and two types of disruptive events (internal and external) in the development of supply chain resilience strategies. We find that external disruptive events have a positive impact on supply chain resilience but internal disruptive events have a negative impact in the development of resilience. However, once a business continuity plan is in place, previous internal disruptive events are associated with more agility. My findings for both essays contribute to the supply chain resilience literature by empirically testing the impact of resilience on performance and the impact of disruptive events on resilience strategies.Item Essays on Supply Chain Finance(2016) Zhu, Weiming; Tunca, Tunay; Business and Management: Decision & Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)I study how a larger party within a supply chain could use its superior knowledge about its partner, who is considered to be financially constrained, to help its partner gain access to cheap finance. In particular, I consider two scenarios: (i) Retailer intermediation in supplier finance and (ii) The Effectiveness of Supplier Buy Back Finance. In the fist chapter, I study how a large buyer could help small suppliers obtain financing for their operations. Especially in developing economies, traditional financing methods can be very costly or unavailable to such suppliers. In order to reduce channel costs, in recent years large buyers started to implement their own financing methods that intermediate between suppliers and financing institutions. In this paper, I analyze the role and efficiency of buyer intermediation in supplier financing. Building a game-theoretical model, I show that buyer intermediated financing can significantly improve supply chain performance. Using data from a large Chinese online retailer and through structural regression estimation based on the theoretical analysis, I demonstrate that buyer intermediation induces lower interest rates and wholesale prices, increases order quantities, and boosts supplier borrowing. The analysis also shows that the retailer systematically overestimates the consumer demand. Based on counterfactual analysis, I predict that the implementation of buyer intermediated financing for the online retailer in 2013 improved channel profits by 18.3%, yielding more than $68M projected savings. In the second chapter, I study a novel buy-back financing scheme employed by large manufacturers in some emerging markets. A large manufacturer can secure financing for its budget-constrained downstream partners by assuming a part of the risk for their inventory by committing to buy back some unsold units. Buy back commitment could help a small downstream party secure a bank loan and further induce a higher order quantity through better allocation of risk in the supply chain. However, such a commitment may undermine the supply chain performance as it imposes extra costs on the supplier incurred by the return of large or costly-to-handle items. I first theoretically analyze the buy-back financing contract employed by a leading Chinese automative manufacturer and some variants of this contracting scheme. In order to measure the effectiveness of buy-back financing contracts, I utilize contract and sales data from the company and structurally estimate the theoretical model. Through counterfactual analysis, I study the efficiency of various buy-back financing schemes and compare them to traditional financing methods. I find that buy-back contract agreements can improve channel efficiency significantly compared to simple contracts with no buy-back, whether the downstream retailer can secure financing on its own or not.Item Interorganizational Innovation: The Role of Suppliers in Enhancing Buyer Innovation(2016) Elking, Isaac; Grimm, Curtis M; Business and Management: Logistics, Business & Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the effect of innovative knowledge transfer across supply chain partners. My research seeks to understand the manner by which a firm is able to benefit from the innovative capabilities of its supply chain partners and utilize the external knowledge they hold to increase its own levels of innovation. Specifically, I make use of patent data as a proxy for firm-level innovation and develop both independent and dependent variables from the data contained within the patent filings. I further examine the means by which key dyadic and portfolio supply chain relationship characteristics moderate the relationship between supplier innovation and buyer innovation. I investigate factors such as the degree of transactional reciprocity between the buyer and supplier, the similarity of the firms’ knowledge bases, and specific chain characteristics (e.g., geographic propinquity) to provide greater understanding of the means by which the transfer of innovative knowledge across firms in a supply chain can be enhanced or inhibited. This dissertation spans three essays to provide insights into the role that supply chain relationships play in affecting a focal firm’s level of innovation. While innovation has been at the core of a wide body of research, very little empirical work exists that considers the role of vertical buyer-supplier relationships on a firm’s ability to develop new and novel innovations. I begin by considering the fundamental unit of analysis within a supply chain, the buyer-supplier dyad. After developing initial insights based on the interactions between singular buyers and suppliers, essay two extends the analysis to consider the full spectrum of a buyer’s supply base by aggregating the individual buyer-supplier dyad level data into firm-supply network level data. Through this broader level of analysis, I am able to examine how the relational characteristics between a buyer firm and its supply base affect its ability to leverage the full portfolio of its suppliers’ innovative knowledge. Finally, in essay three I further extend the analysis to explore the means by which a buyer firm can use its suppliers to enhance its ability to access distant knowledge held by other organizations that the buyer is only connected to indirectly through its suppliers.Item AN ANALYSIS OF PHARMACEUTICAL COUNTERFEITING: ASSESSING SCREENING FACTORS AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON COUNTERFEITING(2015) Rahaman, Faiad; Baecher, Gregory; Civil Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The United States pharmaceutical supply chain is one of the safest and most secure systems in the world. However, in recent years, an increasing number of drug counterfeit products were detected in it. This increase in documented incidents greatly concerns the pharmaceutical industry, and state and federal regulatory bodies. The repercussions of a tainted drug supply chain are potentially economically devastating and detrimental to the health and well-being of the public. Decision makers face a challenge keeping the drug supply chain safe from these influences, specifically assessing the risk of drug counterfeiting. With the problems posed by counterfeit, the identification of the right counterfeit attributes and the development of models to help supply chain managers determine the probability of counterfeit drugs are vital. Known drug counterfeiting research and studies are limited in scope; and despite increasing trends in counterfeiting, empirical research in this area is scarce. This research undertakes an in-depth examination of literature to identify counterfeit attributes and factors as well as to develop a drug counterfeit model to assess the probability of the drug counterfeiting. The identification of drug counterfeiting attributes resulted from a comprehensive review of the literature and a survey of experts. Data were subsequently collected on the attributes identified through literature, case studies, and experts. The findings of this research led to these substantive outcomes: * The identification of 10 key counterfeit attributes: Average Price, Drug Class, Medication Class, Product Type, Volume, Product Complexity, Product Location, Region, Previous Product Counterfeiting, and Product Shortage. * Using exploratory factor analysis, a model emerged with three distinct factors: Market, Product History, and Supply Chain Characteristics. * A process and a model are developed to assess the probability of drug counterfeiting. This is the first known model developed to assess the probability of drug counterfeiting. Decision makers can assess products in an objective and robust way to determine which products are of greater risk of counterfeiting, and to develop policies and strategies to mitigate or minimize counterfeit drugs in the legitimate supply chainItem 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.Item Application and Implementation of the Supply Chain Reference (SCOR) Model at the United States Department of Defense (DoD)(2012) Arendt Jr., Michael James; Gansler, Jacques S.; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)DoD's supply-chain supports over 1 million uniformed, civilian, and contract employees, manages over $90 billion in inventory, and maintains some 15,000 aircraft, 300 ships, and 30,000 combat vehicles. The supply-chain is undeniably the backbone of DoD operations, ultimately enabling it to achieve mission success under a variety of situations. In recent years, the DoD has pursued numerous initiatives for the purposes of improving its supply-chain. Motivations to seek improvements (such as asset tracking, reduced errors, etc.), decreased costs, and increased responsiveness for the warfighter have been plentiful; however, measured improvement thus far has been difficult to ascertain. It is the intent of this research to establish a framework to enable DoD to use industry best practices and process improvements from the Supply Chain Operations Reference Model (SCOR) as a tool for Defense supply-chain modernization efforts. To accomplish this, the dissertation will address the following research questions: 1. How can the Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model be adapted for use as an enterprise-level tool by the United States Department of Defense? 2. Once adapted, what barriers to the implementation of this new tool exist? 3. How can these barriers be overcome?Item Coordinating Demand Fulfillment With Supply Across A Dynamic Supply Chain(2006-04-25) Chen, Maomao; Ball, Michael; Decision and Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Today, technology enables companies to extend their reach in managing the supply chain and operating it in a coordinated fashion from raw materials to end consumers. Order promising and order fulfillment have become key supply chain capabilities which help companies win repeat business by promising orders competitively and reliably. In this dissertation, we study two issues related to moving a company from an Available to Promise (ATP) philosophy to a Profitable to Promise (PTP) philosophy: pseudo order promising and coordinating demand fulfillment with supply. To address the first issue, a single time period analytical ATP model for n confirmed customer orders and m pseudo orders is presented by considering both material constraints and production capacity constraints. At the outset, some analytical properties of the optimal policies are derived and then a particular customer promising scheme that depends on the ratio between customer service level and profit changes is presented. To tackle the second issue, we create a mathematical programming model and explore two cases: a deterministic demand curve or stochastic demand. A simple, yet generic optimal solution structure is derived and a series of numerical studies and sensitivity analyses are carried out to investigate the impact of different factors on profit and fulfilled demand quantity. Further, the firm's optimal response to a one-time-period discount offered by the supplier of a key component is studied. Unlike most models of this type in the literature, which define variables in terms of single arc flows, we employ path variables to directly identify and manipulate profitable and non-profitable products. Numerical experiments based on Toshiba's global notebook supply chain are conducted. In addition, we present an analytical model to explore balanced supply. Implementation of these policies can reduce response time and improve demand fulfillment; further, the structure of the policies and our related analysis can give managers broad insight into this general decision-making environment.Item Effect of Transaction Cost and Coordination Mechanisms on the Length of the Supply Chain(2005-12-05) Iyengar, Deepak; Bailey, Joseph P.; Evers, Philip T.; Decision and Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A drastic reduction in the cost of transmitting information has tremendously increased the °ow and availability of information. Greater availability of information increases the ¯rm's ability to manage its supply chain and, therefore, increases its operational performance. However, current literature is ambiguous about whether increased information °ows leads to either a reduction or increase in transaction cost, which enable supply chains to migrate towards more market-based transactions or hierarchal-based transactions. This research empirically demonstrates that the governance structure of the supply chains changes towards market-based transactions due to a lowering of transaction costs after 1987. Much of the results is based on the theory of Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) and the role of asset speci¯city, uncertainty, and frequency in determin- ing whether or not industries are moving towards markets or hierarchies. Unlike previous supply chain management literature that focuses on relatively short supply chains consisting of two or three supply chain members, Input-Output tables allow for analysis of supply chains with many more members. This paper uses the 1982, 1987, 1992, and 1997 U.S. Benchmark Input-Output tables published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis to analyze supply chains. In so doing, this dissertation not only provides insight into how supply chain structures are changing but also o®ers a sample methodology for other researchers interested in using Input-Output analysis for further supply chain management research. The second part of the dissertation focuses on looking at the e®ect of di®erent coordination mechanisms on supply chain length and supply chain performance using simulation. Three di®erent heuristics that model ordering policies are used to simulate coordination mechanisms. E±ciency is measured on the basis of minimized total net stock for each heuristic used. The results are checked for robustness by using four di®erent demand distributions. The results indicate that if a supply chain has minimized its net stock, then the heuristic used by various echelons in the supply chain need not be harmonized. Also, disintermediation helps in improving the performance of the supply chain.