Janice H. Hammond

Retailing and supply chains in the information age

Abstract This article describes how information technologies have reconfigured retailing and in turn the operation of a core US manufacturing industry, apparel. “Lean retailers” exchange point-of-sales information with their suppliers and require them to replenish orders quickly based on actual sales. This shifts part of the risk arising from changing consumer tastes from retailers and onto suppliers. In response to this shift in risk, we argue that manufacturers must reshape planning methods, cost models, inventory practices, production operations, and sourcing strategies. We then show that suppliers that adopt comprehensive changes to their manufacturing processes perform better along a number of dimensions compared to firms that have not.

The Information-Integrated Channel: A Study of the U.S. Apparel Industry in Transition

THE POPULAR PROGNOSIS for the U.S. apparel industry is bleak. Citing increased import penetration in many product segments and the concurrent erosion of domestic employment, many analysts regard apparel manufacturing in the United States as a dying industry. I The Department of Labor concurs, projecting a significant reduction in employment in the domestic apparel industry during the next decade. Under its most optimistic scenario, the department predicts employment will drop from a 1990 level of 839,000 to 649,000 in 2005; under its most

Generalized Descent Methods for Asymmetric Systems of Equations

We consider generalizations of the steepest descent algorithm for solving asymmetric systems of equations. We first show that if the system is linear and is defined by the matrix M, then the method converges if M2 is positive definite. We also establish easy to verify conditions on the matrix M that ensure that M2 is positive definite, and develop a scaling procedure that extends the class of matrices that satisfy the convergence conditions. In addition, we establish a local convergence result for nonlinear systems defined by uniformly monotone maps, and discuss a class of general descent methods. All of the methods that we consider reduce to standard nonlinear programming algorithms for equivalent optimization problems when the Jacobian of the underlying problem map is symmetric. We interpret the convergence conditions for the generalized steepest descent algorithms as restricting the degree of asymmetry of the problem map.