Supply Chains (SCs) are becoming increasingly complex, and intensified competition in the end markets has started to create a situation where cooperation requirements between companies are increasing, and old mechanistic operations management solutions are becoming obsolete. In this paper we analyse a real-life situation in Alpha’s manufacturing plant in Sweden, which serves northern European countries in consumer markets. Case study findings reveal that the product-mix flexibility requirements are high and lead-time requirements in manufacturing as well as purchasing take weeks or months, not days. Based on the empirical observations, we propose an agent system for this company and discuss different levels of decision making, operative responsibilities and decision time horizons.

Managing inventories so that overall costs are kept low, while service levels are maintained is the central issue of inventory control, which only regulates two things: the size and the timing of orders. This is typically executed through a planning method, such as the reorder point system or, less frequently, the periodic order quantity system. These take into account a forecast, supposed to gauge the average future demand, and a predetermined safety stock, buffering against forecast errors and demand uncertainty. Pure demand also influences the system, as transactions affect the inventory level. It is crucial to understand how a complete system of demand, forecasts, safety stock calculations and planning methods work together to measure service level and overall cost of the system. This paper outlines a framework for the unambiguous representation of the relations between methods that interpret environmental parameters to plan orders. A number of simulations based on the framework are run to show, how the integration of the inventory control functions may affect the overall performance of the system. The usefullness of the framework lies in its ability to make a system duplicable (i.e. to transfer an inventory control system to a simulation model, or vice versa). Not only is this property important for creating simulation models that exactly depict the system being analysed, it also enables the study of a complete system for order planning, as opposed to optimising individual methods. Studying an inclusive system allow the same metrics to be used to evaluate changes to any method in the system. Another benefit of this approach is that the system's metrics directly reflect changes in the environment. Simulations based on this framework are precise and substantially easier to evaluate than models not adhering to any standard.

Nowadays Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have a important role in the performance improvement and control of a company and its entire supply chain. Therefore, this system is a vital part of a company’s competitiveness and new approaches for learning are needed to be developed in order to provide knowledge and skills in faster and more efficient manner for employees. Our aim in this manuscript is it to show, how ERP systems could be incorporated in the logistics courses of a university. This environment provides good platform to test new course formats, since most of the university students do not have any previous experience with these systems.

In this research the structure and contents regarding ERP system usage in certain courses in the logistics curriculum at a Swedish University are being presented. Essentially, a traditional approach, where computer sessions are incorporated in ordinary courses are compared to a new intensive and flexible course format entirely dedicated to ERP systems. Additionally, the two utilized approaches are analyzed through student evaluations based on courses arranged during year 2008.

Research shows that both of the approaches offer good opportunities; the students appreciated the traditional approach, since it allowed them to receive both theoretical and practical knowledge and skills, while they felt the intensive to be beneficial in developing practical side further. Consequently, the best alternative could be to utilize both of these formats. Still, this research shows that skilled responsible lecturer, among intensive course setting, is quite possibly one route for faster learning and higher productivity oflecturing.

Among China and India, former Eastern European countries, and especially Russia has been identified as one of the most lucrative market, e.g. in retail sector. However, this market has experienced quite enormous changes during the last two decades, and manufacturing establishment is considered to contain numerous risks, especially functionality of supply chains (incoming flows and distribution) is one of the main reasons. Our longitudinal case study research confirms this, and shows how difficult it is to achieve comparable cost efficiency in Russia as compared to other factories inside of the same company, but operating in well-developed high-cost country. Due to this, and by the fact that foreign companies still favour export based strategies, we develop mathematical models to evaluate which foreign transit harbours would provide lowest distribution costs. Our research results show that only small number of seaports needs to be considered, if distribution costs are the only issue to be concerned.

Abstract:

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to describe the determinants of profitability in terms of the strategic profitability model (the Du Pont model), depicting the “route” to high profitability in grocery retail stores located in market areas possessing dissimilar competitive conditions. Design/methodology/approach – Different physical characteristics (e.g. store formats) have traditionally been used as control criteria, but it is argued in this paper that management principles in retail chains should be based on different clusters of stores, formed from local competitive conditions. The paper proposes a clustering method based on five indicators of local competition. The research results are derived from local competitive conditions and the performance of 168 supermarkets, located in Sweden, and controlled by one retail chain. Findings – The paper identifies four clusters of local markets labeled monopoly, fleet market, venue, and duopoly, based on local competitive conditions. The findings show that the “route” to profitability significantly differs between the clusters. In monopoly the route to high profitability goes through high-gross margin, while in fleet market the key figures are low cost, large number of shoppers per week, and high productivity. Venue and duopoly both gain from high-average transactions per shopper. Practical implications – Supermarkets under different competitive conditions have different critical success factors and would probably be better managed, supported and evaluated on a different basis, i.e. retail chains need to adjust their approach to their supermarkets depending on local competitive conditions. Originality/value – Based on the findings the paper proposes unique management strategies for different clusters of local markets to further enhance current strength areas.

Third-Party Logistics (3PL) providers have usually developed themselves through transportation ownership (mainly road or sea), and/or warehousing/freight forwarding capability. However, among these actual operations, there exists a number of other routes, e.g. by offering administrative/indirect work of sales, purchasing, business control and inventory management. With increased service level expectations among OEMs, there is a clear need for these kinds of well-defined and performed non-tangible logistical services. In this paper three case studies are presented, which show that a 3PL integrator could arise from this new service context, and could operate all logistical issues, even without any distribution operations ownership.