An EOQ Model for Linear Deteriorating Rates with Shortage and Permissible Delay in Payment

-- C K Tripathy and U Mishra

In this paper a model has been developed to optimize the ordering policy in which the deteriorating rate is linear, the customer fixes a period to settle the account with the supplier, and shortages are allowed. Thus, the customer has a interest-free period to make the payment to the supplier but he can earn interest on his sale proceeds of that period. The results obtained are discussed with the help of an illustrative numerical example.

© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Facility Location Selection Using the UTA Method

-- Rajanikar Kumar, Vijay Manikrao Athawale
and Shankar Chakraborty

In response to increasing inflexible customer demands and to maintain/improve the competitive advantage, manufacturing organizations must adopt strategies to achieve cost reduction, continual quality improvement, increased customer service and on-time delivery performance. Selection of the most suitable facility location for a new organization or expansion of an existing facility is one among the most important strategic issues to fulfill all these above-mentioned objectives. Nowadays, many manufacturing organizations have come to realize the importance of proper selection of the facility locations to survive in the global competitive market. The huge cost associated with acquiring the land and facility construction makes the facility location a long-term investment decision. The best location is that which results in higher economic benefits through increased productivity and good distribution network. Selecting the proper facility location from a given set of candidate alternatives is a difficult task, as many potential qualitative and quantitative criteria need to be considered. This paper attempts to solve two real-time facility location selection problems using the UTility Additive (UTA) method, which is an effective Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) tool often used to deal with complex problems in the manufacturing environment.

© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Ocean Container Carrier Selection Criteria and Their Perceived Importance in the Indian Environment: A Shipper-Only Study

-- Vanumamalai Kannan, S K Bose and N G Kannan

The objective of this paper is to assist ocean container carriers in devising effective marketing strategies to attract and retain Indian shippers. It has been achieved by letting the container carriers understand the list of criteria Indian shippers use in their carrier selection decisions along with their perceived importance. To explore the criteria, review of transportation literature, customer satisfaction survey questionnaires and review of SERVQUAL battery, telephonic interviews and focus groups were conducted. To bring out the perceived importance, a questionnaire was used. A mean score analysis was carried out to analyze the importance of each criterion along with its overall rank. On analysis, it was found that the Indian shippers use forty eight criteria in their container carrier selection decisions and out of these, low freight is the first ranked criterion and pricing flexibility is the second ranked one. Gifts and compliments is the least important criterion in the list. All the 48 criteria have been classified only under three ratings, viz., somewhat important, important and extremely important and none of them have been rated neutral or less than that. It is a premier study of this kind undertaken in India and hence is expected to open up enormous scope for future research.

© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Drivers of Sustainable Supply Chain Management

-- Hanuv Mann, Uma Kumar, Vinod Kumar and Inder Jit Singh Mann

The focus on sustainability has shifted from local optimization to entire supply chains. This paper identifies the drivers that motivate firms to the move towards creating sustainable supply chains. An objective-oriented taxonomy is suggested to situate drivers of supply chain management in a sustainable environment. This unique view allows for clear delineation of the drivers and will potentially form the basis for future research in sustainable supply chain management.

© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.