Business Commons^™

Reevaluating Order Fulfillment Decisions For E-Tailers Under True Simulated Operating Conditions, Amir H. Kalantari

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation makes both a methodological and an applied contribution. From a methodological standpoint, this is among the very first works in the literature to explore the concepts of true simulated operating conditions and fully embedded decision-making algorithms. We illustrate the effectiveness of these concepts by applying them to an online retailer (i.e. e-tailer) order fulfillment decision making process.

Online shopping has completely transformed retail markets in recent years. For customers, it provides convenience, visibility and choice, and for retailers it provides market expansion opportunities, operational cost reduction, and many other advantages. There are fundamental differences between the supply chain …

Essays On Shipment Consolidation Scheduling And Decision Making In The Context Of Flexible Demand, Sepideh Alavi

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation contains three essays related to shipment consolidation scheduling and decision making in the presence of flexible demand. The first essay is presented in Section 1. This essay introduces a new mathematical model for shipment consolidation scheduling for a two-echelon supply chain. The problem addresses shipment coordination and consolidation decisions that are made by a manufacturer who provides inventory replenishments to multiple downstream distribution centers. Unlike previous studies, the consolidation activities in this problem are not restricted to specific policies such as aggregation of shipments at regular times or consolidating when a predetermined quantity has accumulated. Rather, we consider …

Two Essays On Distribution, Fulfillment And Pricing Decisions For Retailers With E-Commerce Channel, Khosro Pichka

Theses and Dissertations

E-commerce has grown rapidly in the past decade. In 2015, e-commerce was accounted for 7.2 percent of all retail sales in the U.S., which is massively higher than 0.2 percent in 1998 (U.S. Department of Commerce 2017). Worldwide e-commerce sales also show the same trend and reached $2.356 trillion in 2018 and are expected to grow steadily (Statista 2017). This trend has impacted major areas of operations management including supply chain management and revenue management. Today, e-commerce companies cannot satisfy their customers’ demand using traditional distribution systems. Therefore, retailers with e-commerce channels (e-tailers), cooperate with third party logistic service providers …

Strategic Nurse Allocation Policies Under Dynamic Patient Demand, Osman Tuncay Aydas

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

STRATEGIC NURSE ALLOCATION POLICIES UNDER DYNAMIC PATIENT DEMAND

by Osman T. Aydas

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2017

Under the Supervision of Professor Anthony D. Ross

Several studies have shown a strong association between nurse staffing and patient outcomes. When a nursing unit is chronically short-staffed, nurses must maintain an intense pace to ensure that patients receive timely care. Over time this can result in nurse burnout, as well as dissatisfied patients and even medical errors. Improved accuracy in the allocation of nursing staff can mitigate these operational risks and improve patient outcomes. Nursing care is identified as the single …

Facility Location Decision For Global Entrepreneurial Small-To-Medium Enterprises Using Similarity Coefficient-Based Clustering Algorithms, Suhail H. Serbaya

Theses and Dissertations

Decisions on location selection are critical for the survival of small-to-medium entrepreneurial organizations from the time they are established until later stages of operation and expansion. The selection of location for small and medium entrepreneurial businesses requires a selection strategy that incorporates relevant factors, quantifies these factors and develops a methodology that analyzes data for better decision-making. In the era of globalization where borders have become easier to transcend, many small ventures tend to choose more attractive international markets as a potential location for their operations where they can obtain higher returns on their investment. Thus, significant changes in the …

Manufacturing Site Selection In The Global Context, Mahsa Mardikoraem Mardikoraem

Theses and Dissertations

The decision making regarding global site selection has been always a challenging and strategic problem. Recently, due to the globalization of the problem many new factors such as political, social, regulatory, government, environmental consideration, etc. gained importance in the decision making process. One of the goals in this thesis is to identify the relevant factors in manufacturing site selection and incorporate them into the data analysis. The collection of a wide range of factors that impact the manufacturing site selection problem at a country level, the quantification of these factors, and incorporation of them into the decision making process needs …

Strategic Inventories In A Supply Chain With Vertical Control And Downstream Cournot Competition, Vijayendra Viswanathan

Theses and Dissertations

Strategic Inventory (SI) has been an area of increased interest in theoretical supply chain literature recently. Most of the work so far however, has only considered a supply chain without downstream competition between retailers. Competition is ubiquitous in most market situations, hence, interactions between SI and retailer competition merits study as a first step in bringing the conversations and insights from this stream of literature to the real world.

We present here a two-period and a three-period model of one manufacturer supplying an identical product to two retailers who form a Cournot duopoly. We also study a Commitment contract, where …

Warranty Period And Product Price Optimization For Remanufactured Products, Yuxi Liu

Theses and Dissertations

This study considers a remanufactured electrical product under a tiered warranty policy. Warranty is key in ensuring a good manufacturer—consumer relationship. Manufacturers hope to minimize warranty costs while consumers believe that good warranty promises better product quality and reliability. This Thesis presents an optimal warranty period from the perspective of a manufacturer to maximize the total expected profits, while ensuring sustained consumer relation. We use real data from a local company with a global supply chain to provide a numerical example.

Optimal Cyclic Control Of A Buffer Between Two Consecutive Non-Synchronized Manufacturing Processes, Wenhuan Hsieh

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents methods for efficiently controlling a buffer that is located between two non-synchronized manufacturing processes. Several machines with different cycle times and/or batch sizes perform each manufacturing process. The overall operation cycles every T time units. The first objective of the problem is to minimize the average buffer inventory level during one cycle. The second objective is to minimize the maximum inventory level observed at any point during the cycle. This new optimization problem has not been previously considered in the literature. An integer program is developed to model this problem. In addition, two heuristic methods—a simulated annealing …

A Study On The Synthesis - Structure - Property - Performance Relationship Of Bulk Functionalized Polyurethane Foams For Water Filtration Applications, Subhashini Gunashekar

Theses and Dissertations

Polymers, macromolecules made of repeat units, are one of the major building blocks of life. They exist naturally in the form of DNA, proteins, sugars, cellulose, natural rubber etc. However, it was only in the mid twentieth century man began to understand its true nature and developed a new class of materials called ‘Plastics’. In recent years, the concept of a truly tailor made polymer has become a reality as a result of better understanding of the polymer structure-property relationships, newer polymerization techniques and due to the availability of new low cost monomers. Polymers from different elements with any desired …

Production Scheduling In Integrated Steel Manufacturing, Wanxi Li

Theses and Dissertations

Steel manufacturing is both energy and capital intensive, and it includes multiple production stages, such as iron-making, steelmaking, and rolling. This dissertation investigates the order schedule coordination problem in a multi-stage manufacturing context. A mixed-integer linear programming model is proposed to generate operational (up to the minute) schedules for the steelmaking and rolling stages simultaneously. The proposed multi-stage scheduling model in integrated steel manufacturing can provide a broader view of the cost impact on the individual stages. It also extends the current order scheduling literature in steel manufacturing from a single-stage focus to the coordinated multi-stage focus. Experiments are introduced …

A Two-Echelon Location-Inventory Model For A Multi-Product Donation-Demand Driven Industry, Milad Khajehnezhad

Theses and Dissertations

This study involves a joint bi-echelon location inventory model for a donation-demand driven industry in which Distribution Centers (DC) and retailers (R) exist. In this model, we confine the variables of interest to include; coverage radius, service level, and multiple products. Each retailer has two classes of product flowing to and from its assigned DC i.e. surpluses and deliveries. The proposed model determines the number of DCs, DC locations, and assignments of retailers to those DCs so that the total annual cost including: facility location costs, transportation costs, and inventory costs are minimized. Due to the complexity of problem, the …