This study examines the organization of service business in manufacturing. Earlier literature has emphasized the positive effects of a separate service unit. Our comparative case study indicates that a separate unit as such does not guarantee success in service business. An essential issue is...

Culture plays an increasingly important role in supply chain management as many manufacturing firms have linkages to suppliers and customers from various countries. In this paper we propose treating culture as an explanatory variable to test the assumption that existing theories are universally...

Hurricane Katrina and other recent disasters have underscored the challenges related to disaster-generated debris disposal. During Katrina, extraordinary amounts of debris, far exceeding typical annual amounts of solid waste, were almost instantaneously deposited across a three-state area....

Several humanitarian organizations today find themselves thinly stretched in multiple protracted relief and recovery operations around the world. At the same time, the need for humanitarian relief and recovery operations is forecasted to increase dramatically in the next decades. Hence,...

This paper aims to understand how best performing companies strive to improve their service levels, under the assumption that not only inventory management, but also warehouse management plays a key role in achieving this goal. To explore this issue, a case-based analysis was conducted on six...

Innovation is by far one of the most important competitive priorities in the current business context. Companies increasingly rely on their supply base to support their innovation potential. As a consequence, the purchasing department might dramatically affect the firm's innovation capability....

While there is a growing body of evidence that Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tagging can be effective in improving inventory management in the retail store, retailers have little guidance on best practices for implementation. One important unresolved issue is whether tagging is equally...