Drawing on the perspective of transaction cost economics (TCE), we explain the operating contexts in which supplier partnership is likely to be an effective strategy to reduce operational costs in the manufacturing industry. We posit that supplier partnership, which falls in the category of...

We consider the problem of scheduling n deteriorating jobs with release dates on a single batching machine. Each job's processing time is an increasing simple linear function of its starting time. The machine can process up to b jobs simultaneously as a batch. The objective is to minimize the...