Manufacturing has been in a state of extraordinary turmoil. The world's manufacturing output is increasingly crossing national borders. Marketing pressures call for flexible systems which are in contrast with large volume production of standardized products. Companies are capitalizing on time as...

We propose a general hierarchical procedure to address real-life job shop scheduling problems. The shop typically produces a variety of products, each with its own arrival stream, its own route through the shop and a given customer due date. The procedure first determines the manufacturing lot...

A major cause of supply chain deficiencies is the bullwhip effect. Supply chain managers experience this variance amplification in both inventory levels and replenishment orders. In this paper, we analyse a major cause of the bullwhip effect, namely the classical Order-Up-To (OUT) policy and...

In this review we focus on supply coordination and use the bullwhip effect as the key example of supply chain inefficiency. We emphasize the managerial relevance of the bullwhip effect and the methodological issues so that both managers and researchers can benefit.