T. C. Edwin Cheng – författare

This book is devoted to analysis and design of supply chain contracts with stochastic demand.  Given the extensive utilization of contracts in supply chains, the issues concerning contract analysis and design are extremely important for supply chain management (SCM), and substantial research has been developed to address those issues over the past years. Despite the abundance of classical research, new research needs to be conducted in response to new issues emerging with the recent changing business environments, such as the fast-shortening life cycle of product and the increasing globalization of supply chains. This book addresses these issues, with the intention to present new research on how to apply contracts to improve SCM.

Contract Analysis and Design for Supply Chains with Stochastic Demand contains eight chapters and each chapter is summarized as follows: Chapter 1 provides a comprehensive review of the classical development of supply chain contracts. Chapter 2 examines the effects of demand uncertainty on the applicability of buyback contracts. Chapter 3 conducts a mean-risk analysis for wholesale price contracts, taking into account contracting value risk and risk preferences. Chapter 4 studies the optimization of product service system by franchise fee contracts in the service-oriented manufacturing supply chain with demand information asymmetry. Chapter 5 develops a bidirectional option contract model and explores the optimal contracting decisions and supply chain coordination issue with the bidirectional option. Chapter 6 addresses supply chain options pricing issue and a value-based pricing scheme is developed for the supply chain options. With a cooperative game theory approach, Chapter 7 explores the issues concerning supply chain contract selection/implementation with the option contract under consideration. Chapter 8 concludes the book and suggests worthy directions for future research.

This book explains global trends and strategies in the shipping business, looking at the role of logistics service providers and at how information technology can help shipping operations. It also introduces best practices and advice that will allow professionals to improve the management of shipping and logistics activities. 

The book consists of sections examining shipping and trade, business strategies for shipping, intermodal container transport operations, and ports. 

This new edition adds a new fifth section with four new chapters that discusses contemporary issues in shipping. The new chapters are related to risk management in shipping, shipping security and safety, environmental and social sustainability, and a review of new technologies in the shipping industry and their future potential.  

An invaluable source of information for researchers and advanced, or graduate, students, Shipping and Logistics Management is also a useful reference for shipping practitioners and consultants.

This handbook is a compilation of comprehensive reference sources that provide state-of-the-art findings on both theoretical and applied research on sustainable fashion supply chain management. It contains three parts, organized under the headings of “Reviews and Discussions,” “Analytical Research,” and “Empirical Research,” featuring peer-reviewed papers contributed by researchers from Asia, Europe, and the US. This book is the first to focus on sustainable supply chain management in the fashion industry and is therefore a pioneering text on this topic.

In the fashion industry, disposable fashion under the fast fashion concept has become a trend. In this trend, fashion supply chains must be highly responsive to market changes and able to produce fashion products in very small quantities to satisfy changing consumer needs. As a result, new styles will appear in the market within a very short time and fashion brands such as Zara can reduce the whole process cycle from conceptual design to a final ready-to-sell “well-produced and packaged” product on the retail sales floor within a few weeks. From the supply chain’s perspective, the fast fashion concept helps to match supply and demand and lowers inventory. Moreover, since many fast fashion companies, e.g., Zara, H&M, and Topshop, adopt a local sourcing approach and obtain supply from local manufacturers (to cut lead time), the corresponding carbon footprint is much reduced. Thus, this local sourcing scheme under fast fashion would enhance the level of environmental friendliness compared with the more traditional offshore sourcing. Furthermore, since the fashion supply chain is notorious for generating high volumes of pollutants, involving hazardous materials in the production processes, and producing products by companies with low social responsibility, new management principles and theories, especially those that take into account consumer behaviours and preferences, need to bedeveloped to address many of these issues in order to achieve the goal of sustainable fashion supply chain management.

The topics covered include Reverse Logistics of US Carpet Recycling; Green Brand Strategies in the Fashion Industry; Impacts of Social Media on Consumers’ Disposals of Apparel; Fashion Supply Chain Network Competition with Eco-labelling; Reverse Logistics as a Sustainable Supply Chain Practice for the Fashion Industry; Apparel Manufacturers’ Path to World-class Corporate Social Responsibility; Sustainable Supply Chain Management in the Slow-Fashion Industry; Mass Market Second-hand Clothing Retail Operations in Hong Kong; Constraints and Drivers of Growth in the Ethical Fashion Sector: The case of France; and Effects of Used Garment Collection Programmes in Fast Fashion Brands.

Quick Response (QR) policy is a market-driven business strategy in which supply chain members work together to react quickly to volatile market demand. Nowadays, with advances in information technologies (such as RFID and ERP systems), new challenges and opportunities arise for the application of QR. This handbook explores QR extensively with a view to discovering innovative QR measures that can help tackle the observed and emerging challenges. The book is organized into four parts, which include chapters on analytical modeling and analyses, information technologies, cases, reviews, and applications. This handbook provides new analytical and empirical results with valuable insights, which will not only help supply chain agents to better understand the latest applications of QR in business, but also help practitioners and researchers to know how to improve the effectiveness of QR using innovative methods.