Richard Pibernik

Secure Collaborative Supply-Chain Management

The SecureSCM project demonstrates the practical applicability of secure multiparty computation to online business collaboration. A prototype supply-chain management system protects the confidentiality of private data while rapidly adapting to changing business needs.

Managing stock‐outs effectively with order fulfilment systems

Purpose – When approaching a stock‐out situation, a company should be able to actively manage the allocation of available products on the basis of customer requirements and priorities as well as contractual relationships. The purpose of this paper is to describe different order promising mechanisms and analyze how well they can contribute to the effective management of stock‐out situations.Design/methodology/approach – The paper provides a formal description and analysis of alternative order promising mechanism applicable in make to stock systems. Numerical analysis is conducted based on the data of a pharmaceutical company.Findings – The paper clearly points out the potential of alternative order promising mechanisms to alleviate the negative consequences associated with a temporary stock‐out situation.Research limitations/implications – The paper does not consider implications of inventory pre‐allocation to customer classes. Further research should address the interplay between pre‐allocation and differ...

Inventory reservation and real-time order promising in a Make-to-Stock system

In this paper we consider a Make-to-Stock order fulfillment system facing random demand with random due date preferences from two classes of customers. We develop an integrated approach for reserving inventory in anticipation of future order arrivals from high priority customers and for order promising in real-time. Our research exhibits three distinct features: (1) we explicitly model uncertain due date preferences of the customers; (2) we consider multiple receipts in the planning horizon that can be utilized to fulfill customer orders; and (3) we choose to utilize a service level measure for reserving inventory rather than estimating short- and long-term implications of order promising with a penalty cost function. We propose an algorithm that exploits the time structure in order arrivals and time-phased material receipts to determine inventory reservations for high priority orders. Numerical experiments are conducted to investigate the performance and the benefits of the inventory reservation and order promising approach under varying system parameters.

Centralised and decentralised supply chain planning

The major task of supply chain planning – as the tactical level of supply chain management – is the determination of supply-chain-wide master plans on a medium-term basis. Both in literature and in commercial supply chain management systems, a centralised approach to supply chain planning is frequently proposed. Due to the incongruence between incentives of the firms involved in the supply chain and overall supply chain objectives, a centralised supply chain planning will either not be accepted or will not lead to system-wide effectiveness. For this reason, supply chain planning decisions are most commonly coordinated on a decentralised basis. In this paper, we analyse the implications and limitations of centralised and decentralised supply chain planning approaches. The results derived from this analysis establish the basis for introducing a generic, conceptual approach supporting the design of a decentralised supply chain planning.

Reservation and allocation policies for influenza vaccines

This research investigates the impact of alternative allocation mechanisms that can be employed in the context of vaccine inventory rationing. Available vaccine inventory can be allocated to arrivals from high priority (target groups such as healthcare professionals) and low priority (non-target groups) demand classes using Partitioned Allocation (PA), Standard Nesting (SN), and Theft Nesting (TN). In any one of the mechanisms, a part of the available inventory is reserved for the exclusive use of the high priority demand class. They differ, however, in how the unreserved portion of the inventory is utilized: Under PA, demand from the high (low) priority class consumes only the reserved (unreserved) quantity. Under SN, demand from the high priority class first consumes the reserved quantity; once and if this quantity is exhausted, high priority demand competes with low priority demand for the remaining inventory. Under TN the sequence of allocation is reversed: both demand classes first compete for the unreserved inventory. Once this portion of inventory is exhausted, high priority demand is fulfilled from the reserved inventory and low priority demand is rejected. We develop service level (probability of fulfilling the entire demand) and fill rate (fraction of demand fulfilled) expressions for all three allocation mechanisms. Based on these expressions, numerical analyses are conducted to illustrate which allocation mechanism a health planner should choose depending on the availability of vaccines, and how the health planner should set the reserved quantity for the high priority class. We observe that (1) there exist certain conditions under which one of the allocation mechanisms outperforms the others and (2) this effect is determined by the decision maker’s choice of the performance measure.

Hit or Miss: What Leads Experts to Take Advice for Long-Term Judgments?

Managers and policy makers frequently face crucial strategic decisions that inevitably rely on judgments about relevant future events. These judgments are often characterized by very high uncertainty and the absence of experience from previous good or bad judgments. Judgments of other experts are oftentimes an important—sometimes the only—source of additional information to reduce uncertainty and improve judgment accuracy. However, in many practical situations, decision makers have very limited means to evaluate the quality of such “advice” from other experts and could tend to ignore this valid source of information. In this paper, we study what leads decision makers to take advice from an expert panel when judging the probability of far-future events with high economic impact. Our analysis is based on a unique data set that comprises more than 15,000 advice-taking decisions made by almost 1,000 experts from different industries. We find that decision makers have a strong tendency to ignore advice, which ...

How Does the Risk Attitude of a Purchasing Manager Affect the Selection of Suppliers

Recently researchers have integrated aspects of supply risk management into decision models for determining the optimal design of supply networks. A purchasing manager faces a fundamental trade-off when designing the supply network and deciding upon the allocation of purchasing volumes across a set of selected suppliers: additional suppliers may act as insurance against disruptions to supply and therefore safeguard supply. However, additional suppliers may also increase the purchasing and overhead costs. One important dimension of this trade-off has not been taken into consideration when evaluating different supplier network options: supplier selection constitutes a decision problem under risk, and so it is reasonable to assume that a purchasing manager’s risk attitude will significantly affect the final outcome. The research presented in this paper intends to provide insights into the potential impact of purchasing managers’ risk attitudes on their supplier selection decisions. We present the results of an artefactual field experiment with 54 managers from 12 industrial companies, and analyze which latent decisionmaking process and which risk attitude best characterizes the behavior of purchasing managers. We find that Expected Utility Theory and Prospect Theory provide complementary information on the risk attitudes of purchasing managers. Moreover, we illustrate the implications that risk attitudes other than risk neutrality may have on purchasing managers’ supplier selection decisions. We show that even for very conservative estimates of risk aversion it is not appropriate to assume a risk-neutral decision maker when applying a formal model to support supplier selection. We also highlight that the choice of a specific theory of decision making under risk is decisive for determining the optimal number of suppliers and their corresponding volume allocation when developing and applying supplier selection models under risk. In particular, we show why the choice of a purchasing budget for purchasing manager is so important: if it is too high it induces risk-loving behavior, and if it is too low it induces risk-averse behavior. Neither may accurately reflect the preferences of the overall company with respect to supply management decisions.

Service differentiation in a single-period inventory model with numerous customer classes

We study critical-level inventory-management policies as means to provide differentiated (

Supply Chain Configuration am Beispiel eines Biotechnologie-Unternehmens

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