Organisations around the world are facing unprecedented challenges to the maintenance of profitability as they confront recessionary markets and increasingly fierce global competition. It is against this backdrop that logistics has emerged as a vital element in the process of corporate renewal....

The benefits of global sourcing as part of a firm's purchasing strategy have been widely discussed in the academic literature, yet so there are few models that provide a comprehensive risk and cost assessment to guide managerial decision-making. In particular, few models capture the dynamic...

Collaboration in the supply chain has been widely discussed, and a wealth of concepts is at hand. Large-scale projects like the Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) in the fast moving consumer goods sector, for example, or Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) and Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and...

The economic growth and industrial development in China over the last decade has been of considerable interest to industry and policy-makers alike, and also been subject of many academic studies. Considerable research on the macro-economic growth and process of industrialisation, as well as the...

Over the past three decades scholars have developed comprehensive insights into the operational and strategic aspect of designing and managing the supply chain. Reviewing this ample body of knowledge however one cannot help but notice a persistent disunion between the “value chain” view that...

In an effort to improve operational efficiency, healthcare services around the world have adopted process improvement methodologies from the manufacturing sector, such as Lean Production. In this paper we report on four multi-level case studies of the implementation of Lean in the English NHS....

This paper examines patterns and trends in motor vehicle safety recalls using a dataset based on 23.1 million vehicles registered in the UK between 1992 and 2002. A safety recall occurs when vehicle manufacturers call vehicles that have been sold and are in use back to their dealerships for...

As the auto industry moves into its second century, it suffers from low margins and a sclerotic value chain that cannot evolve with customer desires. Inventories of many weeks pile up on dealer lots and at distribution centers around the world while executives applaud marginal improvements in...