Decision, Operations & Information Technologies
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2230
Prior to January 4, 2009, this unit was named Decision & Information Technologies.
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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 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.