Financial supply chain management and working capital management are increasingly receiving attention as important avenues to increase profitability in supply chains. By actively managing payment terms and working capital requirements, managers can influence financial performance and achieve...

Trade credit arises when a buyer delays payment for purchased goods or services. Its nature has predominantly been an area of inquiry for researchers from the disciplines of finance, marketing, and economics but it has received relatively little attention in other domains. In our article, we...

We compare how freshmen business students, graduate business students and experienced procurement managers perform on a simple inventory ordering task. We find that, qualitatively, managers exhibit ordering behavior similar to students, including biased ordering towards average demand....

We consider a random yield inventory system, where a company has access to real time information about the actual yield realizations. To contribute to a better understanding of the value of this information, we develop a mathematical model of the inventory system and derive structural...

The European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS) was founded on October, 12th 2004. This Working Paper was written with respect to the establishment of ERCIS. Jörg Becker, Managing Director of the ERCIS, writes about fundamental issues of ERCIS. Furthermore all Founding Members...

We compare how experienced procurement managers and students solve the newsvendor problem. We find that managers broadly exhibit the same kind of pull-to-center bias as students do. Also, managers use information and task training no better than students. The performance of managers is...

The railway crew scheduling problem consists of generating crew duties to operate trains at minimal cost, while meeting all work regulations and operational requirements. Typically, a railway operation uses tens of thousands of train movements (trips) and requires thousands of crew members to be...

Advanced inventory policies require timely system-wide information on inventories and customer demand to accurately control the entire supply chain. However, the presence of unsynchronized processes, processing lags or inadequate communication structures hinder the widespread availability of...

In this paper we consider a 3-echelon, multi-product supply chain design model with economies of scale in transport and warehousing that explicitly takes transport frequencies into consideration. Our model simultaneously optimizes locations and sizes of tank farms, material flows, and transport...