The authors examine the implications of electronic shopping for consumers, retailers, and manufacturers. They assume that near-term technological developments will offer consumers unparalleled opportunities to locate and compare product offerings. They examine these advantages as a function of typical consumer goals and the types of products and services being sought and offer conclusions regarding consumer incentives and disincentives to purchase through interactive home shopping vis-à-vis traditional retail formats. The authors discuss implications for industry structure as they pertain to competition among retailers, competition among manufacturers, and retailer-manufacturer relationships.

Interactive home shopping: Consumer, retailer, and manufacturer incentives to participate in

Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research. Section B; Microstructural Characterization of Semi-Interpenetrating Polymer Networks by Positron Lifetime Spectroscopy

RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) technology has shown itself to be a promising technology to track movements of goods in a supply chain. As such, it can give unprecedented visibility to the supply chain. Such visibility can save labor cost, improve supply chain coordination, reduce inventory and increase product availability. Industry reports and white papers are now filled with estimates and proclamations of the benefits and quantified values of RFID. Early adopters are now rallying more and more followers. However, most such claims are educated guesses at best and are not substantiated, that is, they are not based on detailed, model-based analysis. This paper argues that there is a huge credibility gap of the value of RFID, and that a void exists in showing how the proclaimed values are arrived at, and how those values can be realized. The paper shows that this credibility gap must be filled with solid model analysis, and therefore presents a great opportunity for the Production and Operations Management (POM) research community. The paper reviews some of the ongoing research efforts that attempt to close the credibility gap, and suggests additional directions for further strengthening the POM's contribution to help industry realize the full potentials of RFID.

/pdf/unlocking-the-value-of-rfid-y7l2dfvsue.pdf

Unlocking the Value of RFID

http://web.nchu.edu.tw/pweb/users/hsiaolu/lesson/9917.pdf

Channel Selection and Coordination in Dual-Channel Supply Chains

This paper investigates the influence of channel structures and channel coordination on the supplier, the retailer, and the entire supply chain in the context of two single-channel and two dual-channel supply chains. We extensively study two Pareto zone concepts: channel-adding Pareto zone and contract-implementing Pareto zone. In the channel-adding Pareto zone, both the supplier and the retailer benefit from adding a new channel to the traditional single-channel supply chain. In the contract-implementing Pareto zone, it is mutually beneficial for the supplier and the retailer to utilize the proposed contract coordination policy. The analysis suggests the preference lists of the supplier and the retailer over channel structures with and without coordination are different, and depend on parameters like channel base demand, channel operational costs, and channel substitutability.

http://vega.cs.kent.edu/~mikhail/Download/RA/Papers/Retail/DualChannel.pdf

A supply chain model with direct and retail channels

We develop a model and analyze reverse information sharing, a growing business practice in supply chain management in which a manufacturer shares information about supply with a retailer. We model the manufacturer as a production queue with finished goods warehouse, the retailer as an inventory location, and other customers as an external demand stream. In our model, the manufacturer allows the retailer access to inventory status at the warehouse. To take advantage of this new information, the retailer changes from a single-level base-stock policy to a two-level, state-dependent base-stock policy. We provide an exact method for computing performance and develop a procedure for evaluating optimal policy. We demonstrate the impact of the new policy on the manufacturer and other customers. Numerical computations lead to insights about the value of information to the retailer, and to guidelines for the manufacturer on sharing information.

https://faculty.washington.edu/kamran/docs/publications/reverseinfo.pdf

A Supply Chain Model with Reverse Information Exchange

We model two separate, decentralized systems, each consisting of a warehouse and a production capacity. The demand processes experienced by the systems have different variabilities. The two decentralized systems consider an agreement to pool their production capacities. We examine the impact of the pooling of capacity on inventory costs under two operating rules: (i) the orders from the two warehouses are treated in a first-come-first-served manner, and (ii) the orders from the lower-variability warehouse are given nonpreemptive priority.We examine this issue using an analytical model that integrates base-stock inventory models with queuing models for the production capacity. The higher-variability demand is modeled as a hyperexponential renewal process, and the lower-variability demand is modeled as a Poisson process. In case of pooled capacity, the arrival process at the production queue is the superposition of the two processes. We prove conditions under which the first-come-first-served operating rule will fail to achieve a Pareto improvement over the separate systems because it would increase inventory cost at the lower-variability warehouse. We then show cases under which the high-variability warehouse will see a reduction in inventory cost over the split system even if it accepts lower priority.

Modeling the Impact of Merging Capacity in Production-Inventory Systems

We model a supply chain with two retail warehouses that place replenishment orders with a common manufacturing capacity. The two retailers differ in the variability of their order-streams. The order-stream from one retail warehouse is modeled as a Poisson process and from the other as a hyperexponential renewal process. Each retail warehouse uses a base-stock policy to place replenishment orders with the manufacturer. The manufacturer is modeled as a first-come-first-serve, single exponential server queue. We analyze the supply-side impact of this mixture of order-streams received by the manufacturer on both retailers. An exact analysis of this base-model generates closed-form expressions for distributions of the lead-time, outstanding orders, and expected inventory costs for each retailer, and leads to comparative results about the two retailers- performance measures. The base-model is extended to accommodate finished goods at the manufacturer, more than two retailers, and bulk-arrivals. We use the model to suggest managerial insights about the impact of the presence of a high-variability retailer on other retailers who share capacity, the distorting impact of manufacturer finished goods inventory on retailer incentives, and the incentives for retailers to participate in variability-reduction programs in the grocery industry.

Apurva Jain

Papers

A supply chain model with direct and retail channels

A Supply Chain Model with Reverse Information Exchange

Modeling the Impact of Merging Capacity in Production-Inventory Systems

The Logistics Impact of a Mixture of Order-Streams in a Manufacturer-Retailer System

Value of capacity pooling in supply chains with heterogeneous customers