In recent years, the design of contracts in supply chains has received significant attention from researchers and practitioners. Companies try to improve their profits by designing efficient contracts that ensure a high availability of the product at a low cost. In this book the author presents a quantitative approach for designing optimal supply chain contracts. Firstly, service level contracts, which are frequently used between a supplier and a manufacturer, are analyzed. For this contract type, optimal contract parameter combinations are identified that lead to a coordinated supply chain. Secondly, an optimal contract selection strategy is developed for a supply chain where a manufacturer can choose among multiple potential buyers. Potential readership includes scholars of supply chain management and management science, graduate students interested in these areas as well as interested practitioners involved in negotiating contracts.
Corporate Social Responsibility has for long been on the agenda in the business world and recently, it has also become a political agenda in the European Union. Focusing on international supply chains and their control based on studies of law in several European jurisdictions, this book aims to advance the discussion on the application and enforcement of CSR. Drawing parallels to US and Canadian law, the book explores to what extent private law tools can be used as an enforcement device and it ultimately asks if what we are witnessing is the formation of a new area of law, employing the interplay of contract and tort – a law of "production liability", as a corollary of the concept of "product liability".
What Will This Book Do for You? This book provides a survival manual for anyone involved in the crafting, structuring, negotiating, supporting or managing contracts involving commercial transactions of goods, services or both. It blends the practical with general legal principles and highlights best practices for supply chain professionals and anyone else involved, directly or indirectly, with the generation or management of contracts from cradle-to-grave. Even commercially wise and sophisticated organizations can be untrained and unaware of certain gaps and traps in the management of their contracts. This book addresses those pitfalls and provides lessons learned and guidance that are not typically taught at the college or even graduate school level. Experience can be hard and expensive to come by and this book provides a concentrated dose of experience that immediately raises the reader's level of sophistication and awareness for gaps and traps while providing practical solutions to pitfalls that can haunt any organization. Left unchecked, these pitfalls can lead to dysfunction and confusion; both of which can be an expensive proposition in today's competitive and uncertain economic environment. Who Should Use this Book? Supply Chain Management Professionals, Risk Managers, Insurance Experts, Project Managers, Purchasing Agents, Contract Administrators, Executives and any business or technical professionals who are involved with developing, managing or implementing projects, purchases or any complex transaction or procurement where cost, schedule and scope certainty are important. What Does This Book Cover? This book covers how the relationship of the parties affects commercial transactions and addresses the importance of upholding the integrity of the process and the contract by understanding key supply chain best practices. The book focuses on contracting strategies and approaches including how to structure requests for proposals and instructions to bidders as well as key considerations in pricing and pricing adjustments, risk management tools and techniques, the importance of defining the deliverables and outcomes, negotiation strategies and techniques, negotiating warranties and remedies, applying leadership and influencing skills to the process, how to implement sound change management as well as capturing and applying past lessons learned. In addition, special attention is given to the importance of sound "kick off" and "close out", including termination for cause or convenience techniques and other best practices.
Quantitative models and computer-based tools are essential for making decisions in today's business environment. These tools are of particular importance in the rapidly growing area of supply chain management. This volume is a unified effort to provide a systematic summary of the large variety of new issues being considered, the new set of models being developed, the new techniques for analysis, and the computational methods that have become available recently. The volume's objective is to provide a self-contained, sophisticated research summary - a snapshot at this point of time - in the area of Quantitative Models for Supply Chain Management. While there are some multi-disciplinary aspects of supply chain management not covered here, the Editors and their contributors have captured many important developments in this rapidly expanding field. The 26 chapters can be divided into six categories. Basic Concepts and Technical Material (Chapters 1-6). The chapters in this category focus on introducing basic concepts, providing mathematical background and validating algorithmic tools to solve operational problems in supply chains. Supply Contracts (Chapters 7-10). In this category, the primary focus is on design and evaluation of supply contracts between independent agents in the supply chain. Value of Information (Chapters 11-13). The chapters in this category explicitly model the effect of information on decision-making and on supply chain performance. Managing Product Variety (Chapters 16-19). The chapters in this category analyze the effects of product variety and the different strategies to manage it. International Operations (Chapters 20-22). The three chapters in this category provide an overview of research in the emerging area of International Operations. Conceptual Issues and New Challenges (Chapters 23-27). These chapters outline a variety of frameworks that can be explored and used in future research efforts. This volume can serve as a graduate text, as a reference for researchers and as a guide for further development of this field.
The Economic Foundations of Supply Chains Contracts is premised on the theme that as supply chain management moves from a focus on optimization problems to issues of coordination, a closer link to the underlying economic foundations is essential. This monograph offers a synthesis of the economic foundations of supply chain contracts. Accordingly, the coverage is selective and incorporates elements of economic theory that we believe will be of most value to our intended readers, the students and scholars of management science and operations management. After and introduction, Section 2 provides an overview of evidence on the nature and frequency of specific supply chain contracts. Section 3 offers some brief remarks on methodology concerning the application of economic theory to supply chain contracting. Section 4 reviews the basic setting: perfect markets. The simplest departure from perfect markets is the introduction of market power. This is examined in Section 5 via the assumption of a single monopolist upstream, facing a competitive downstream market. Section 6 considers contracts in a standard framework: one firm operates at each of two levels of a supply chain. Section 7 adds imperfect competition downstream. Section 8 considers contracts in a setting with a single downstream firm and multiple upstream firms, including the case of a single incumbent firm facing potential entry. Section 9 reviews the role of contracts in competing supply chains. Sections 10 and 11 review the dynamics of supply chain contracting and an explicit asymmetric information approach to contracting. Section 12 reviews the key contributions to the fundamental issues of vertical integration, investment in specific assets, and long run or relational contracting. Section 13 concludes the monograph with an overview of additional issues in the economics of supply chain contracting
This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online.
The managed flow of goods and information from raw material to final sale also known as a "supply chain" affects everythingâ€"from the U.S. gross domestic product to where you can buy your jeans. The nature of a company's supply chain has a significant effect on its success or failureâ€"as in the success of Dell Computer's make-to-order system and the failure of General Motor's vertical integration during the 1998 United Auto Workers strike. Supply Chain Integration looks at this crucial component of business at a time when product design, manufacture, and delivery are changing radically and globally. This book explores the benefits of continuously improving the relationship between the firm, its suppliers, and its customers to ensure the highest added value. This book identifies the state-of-the-art developments that contribute to the success of vertical tiers of suppliers and relates these developments to the capabilities that small and medium-sized manufacturers must have to be viable participants in this system. Strategies for attaining these capabilities through manufacturing extension centers and other technical assistance providers at the national, state, and local level are suggested. This book identifies action steps for small and medium-sized manufacturersâ€"the "seed corn" of business start-up and developmentâ€"to improve supply chain management. The book examines supply chain models from consultant firms, universities, manufacturers, and associations. Topics include the roles of suppliers and other supply chain participants, the rise of outsourcing, the importance of information management, the natural tension between buyer and seller, sources of assistance to small and medium-sized firms, and a host of other issues. Supply Chain Integration will be of interest to industry policymakers, economists, researchers, business leaders, and forward-thinking executives.
This book investigates the legal measures that multinational companies in the Netherlands, England and California take to govern corporate social responsibility aspects of their supply chains and the legal implications these measures have in terms of contract and liability law.
In all but the smallest of projects the project sponsor inevitably has to buy-in the services of other suppliers. Goods and services must be bought, and this requires people to make contracts so that they know the basis on which they are working with each other and to deal with any disagreements that subsequently arise. This means that a knowledge of contracting specifically for project management is essential if a project is to avoid difficulties and reach a successful conclusion. This book concentrates specifically on the contracting issues that surround projects of any size.
