During the late 1980s, globalization of the world's economies and technological development created the conditions for the expansion of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in telecommunications. This tendency has been further boosted by different economic reforms that countries have implemented,...

Globalization increases product variety and shortens product life cycles. These lead to an increase in demand uncertainty and variability. Outsourcing to low-cost countries increases supply lead-time and supply uncertainty and variability. Coupled with the increase of mergers and acquisitions,...

The upstream petroleum supply chain is inefficient and uneconomical because of the independence of the four complex and fragmented functions which comprise it. Crude oil exploration, trading, transportation, and refining are functions which may be integrated through unified decision-making...

A convergence of factors including a strong economy, changing demographics and increased regulatory control has resulted in a U.S. For-Hire Truckload (TL) industry that is increasingly pressed to meet shippers' needs for freight services. As demand now exceeds supply, the buyer/seller...

Predicting customer demand in the highly competitive grocery retail business has become extremely difficult, especially for promotional items. The difficulty in promotional forecasting has resulted from numerous internal and external factors that affect the demand patterns. It has also resulted...

This thesis focuses on documenting learnings from a RFID data exchange pilot in the fast moving consumer goods industry. The pilot we studied is a collaborative effort between two of the largest retailers in the world and five of their major suppliers, facilitated by EPCglobal and the MIT...

Process integration has become more and more important in today's world where companies' supply chains have become more complex. Companies around the world are beginning to realize the importance of integrating their supply chain business processes to achieve fulfillment excellence....

The application of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has been studied for decades, and many field trials have been executed to evaluate the usability of RFID systems, the business case of RFID applications and so forth. One of the trial fields is its application to supply chain management...

Currently many alternative options exist to satisfy the RFID mandate by Wal-Mart--tag cases at the exit doors, tag all cases at the supplier's warehouse docks, tag a certain section of the warehouse, etc. The big question is how to prevent Wal-Mart suppliers from treating the cost of EPC...

We explore corporate decisions and their solutions under uncertainty using engineering methods. Corporate decisions tend to be complex; they are interdisciplinary and defy programmable solutions. To address these challenges, we take an engineering approach. Our proposition is that as in an...