Third party logistics _ the best solution for multinational corporations manage supply chain in China

Synopsis
Chapter 1 Introduction
Many industries have experienced shortening product lifecycles, globalized supply chains, increased competition, and more demanding customers. On the other hand, advances in information technologies, e.g., EDI (electronic data interchange) and Internet, make fast data/information collection or transformation possible. By considering these circumstances, one part of this dissertation develops and studies the optimization models in a service-constrained supply chain with information updates. The advances in information technologies also have facilitated the widespread adoption of the drop-shipping practice, which characterizes a retailer with no inventory forwarding customers’ orders to a supplier who owns inventory and fills the orders. This practice is common with online retailers. Most work in the literature has assumed full information sharing between the business partners. However, it is rare in reality because of the lack of trust among the partners. More likely, the retailer knows about his customer demand whereas the supplier does not. How the supplier designs a supply contract by which she can infer the buyer’s demand information as well as maximize her expected profit is a question of interest. The second part of this dissertatio英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】n addresses this issue in a gaming environment.
Chapter 2 A supply chain with a service requirement for each market signal
In this chapter, we develop and study our basic model of service-constrained supply chain with an information update, where the buyer has two procurement opportunities with the second one after observing a market signal which updates the demand forecast. He also commits to a service level after observing the market signal. We specify our model in Section 2.2. In Section 2.3, we provide the optimal ordering policy at the second stage for each market signal. In Section 2.4, we obtain the optimal order quantity at the first stage. We also discuss certain monotonicity properties in terms of the target service level and the impact of the forecast quality. We obtain a buy back contract that coordinates our service-constrained supply chain in section 2.5. A brief summary is provided in Section 2.6.