Repositório RCAAP

There is not yet any substitute for human blood which remains a scarce resource in many countries. Effective and efficient management of blood supply chains (BSCs) is utmost important in the healthcare industry. This paper gives an overview of the BSC and how blood products are used at hospitals to provide life-saving services to patients.  Factoring in the blood types and their receipt compatibility, a simple inventory model is proposed. Using secondary data, the model is illustrated by way of a small case study in Nova Scotia, Canada. We highlight that due to both demand and supply uncertainties, and due to its perishable nature, inventorying blood products is not straightforward and brings with it many logistical and management challenges in the BSC.

The location of operations in high labor cost countries is increasingly discussed in the media, in part for recent declarations and actions from the president of USA, Donald Trump. While this particular instance can be labeled as populist or protectionist, the factors underlying the debate are extremely important: advances in systematic increases in productivity, low population growth, and the transfer of jobs to countries with lower labor costs are creating unemployment and underemployment in developed countries that could eventually result in protectionism and restrictions to free trade. This phenomenon has enormous social and economic implications, and has attracted considerable interest from researchers. In particular, this study provides empirical evidence of the location of manufacturing and services in the context of a European country (Spain), exploring the drivers, social implications and organizational theories that can explain it.

Editorial Information 2015

This study aims to simulate the effects of contract farming and farmer commitment to contract farming on supply chain performance by using agent based modeling as a methodology. Supply chain performance is represented by profits and service levels. The simulation results indicate that farmers should pay attention to customer requirements and plan their agricultural activities in order to fulfill these requirements. Contract farming helps farmers deal with demand and price uncertainties. We also find that farmer commitment is crucial to fulfilling contract requirements. This study contributes to this field from a conceptual as well as a practical point of view. From the conceptual point of view, our simulation results show that different levels of farmer commitment have an impact on farmer performance when implementing contract farming. From a practical point of view, the uncertainty faced by farmers and the market can be managed by implementing cultivation and harvesting scheduling, information sharing, and collective learning as ways of committing to contract farming.

This paper compares the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emission inventories of Madrid and Salvador and discusses some implications for future researches, focusing on city-level carbon accounting (CLCA) of emissions from urban supply chains (USC) and final consumers. To carry out this study, secondary data were collected from official documents of municipal governments of these two cities. According to the results, there are differences in stationary energy GHG emissions due to the big distinction concerning electricity emission factors used by each city. Air transportation GHG emissions are also very different. These two cities share some common figures regarding road transportation and per capita waste sector GHG emissions. In the conclusion section, we discuss opportunities for improvement of the cities’ GHG emission inventories as well as some implications for policy-making and future researches on carbon accounting, with focus on an integrated production-consumption system.

This paper aims to analyse how the publications in Brazil are considering the relationship between sustainability and supply chain management. For this end, a literature review was carried out in 120 Brazilian academic journals in which 124 papers were identified, from 2008 until 2013. When considering the Triple Bottom Line approach, the results show that sustainability research in Brazil is focusing on the environmental dimension and SCM research is focusing on the economic dimension. Additional inputs are provided by integrating the governance dimension in the analysis to underline which actions and policies are discussed in Brazil at a corporate level. To support the results a consultation of experts in the field of sustainability in Brazil was fulfilled, and three case examples are presented to explain some of the research results. The findings on publications in Brazil contrast with international studies, particularly on the topic of social performance and management in supply chains. One of the main conclusions is that there are large opportunities to increase publications about sustainability and SCM in the country and that Brazil presents some specificities in the field that researchers and managers shall consider.

This paper takes a triple bottom line perspective to analyze how the international operations literature integrates economic, social, and environmental issues. Additionally, it shows the main drivers of and barriers to the adoption of triple bottom line practices by companies in an international context. We conducted a literature review in English language journals which publish research of production and operations management and sustainability, resulting in a final sample of 29 papers. Results show that social and legal pressure for companies to adopt a responsible behavior prompts an isomorphic process that leads them to conduct their operations on behalf of triple bottom line goals. Behavioral differences between spin-offs in various countries caused institutions to create mechanisms that can press and change private standards through regulation and enforcement. There is room for progress in studies that seek to analyze the company’s relationships in its international experience and its multi-institutional relations.

The brewing industry has been moving towards more efficient use of energy, water reuse and stewardship, and the tracking of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to better manage environmental and social responsibility. Commercial breweries use a great deal of water and energy to convert one gallon (liter) of water into one gallon (liter) of beer. An analysis was conducted on sustainable operations and supply chain management at various United States and international breweries, specifically Europe, to benchmark brewery performance and establish common metrics for sustainability in the beer supply chain. The primary research questions explored in this article are whether water reclamation and GHG emissions can be properly monitored and measured and if processes can be created to help control waste (lean) and emissions. Additional questions include how we can use operations management strategies and techniques such as the Factor-Weighted Method (FWM) in industries such as brewing to develop sustainability scorecards.

Process capability analysis (PCA) is a vital step in ascertaining the quality of the output from a production process. Particularly in batch and mass production of components with specified quality characteristics, PCA helps to decide about accepting the process and later to continue with it. In this paper, the application of PCA using process capability indices is demonstrated using data from the field and benchmarked against Six Sigma as a motivation to improve to meet the global standards. Further, how the two important process parameters namely mean and the standard deviation can be monitored is illustrated with the help of what if analysis feature of Excel. Finally, the paper enables to determine the improvement efforts using simulation to act as a quick reference for decision makers. The global benchmarking in the form of Six Sigma capability of the process is expected to give valuable insight towards process improvement.

Environmental purchasing has been one of its most significant elements in Green Supply Chain Management (GSCM). By implementing environmental purchasing, companies adopt additional criteria for evaluating suppliers, which, as argued, gen­erates additional transaction costs. From the GSCM theoretical basis, and looking through the analytical lenses of Transaction Cost Economics (TCE), this article aims to discuss the transaction costs involved in the supplier selection process with the environmental purchasing approach. As result, this article presents five propositions of TCE within the GSCM in the light of two cases, which relate the possible transac­tion costs involved in each stage of the environmental purchasing process and also according to the main transaction elements.

Inventory classification aims to ensure that business-driving inventory items are efficiently managed in spite of constrained resources. There are numerous single- and multiple-criteria approaches to it. Our objective is to improve resource allocation to focus on items that can lead to high equipment availability. This concern is typical of many service industries such as military logistics, airlines, amusement parks and public works. Our study tests several inventory prioritization techniques and finds that a modified multi-criterion weighted non-linear optimization (WNO) technique is a powerful approach for classifying inventory, outperforming traditional techniques of inventory prioritization such as ABC analysis in a variety of performance objectives.

Studies about airport operational efficiency models generally disregard the correlation between operational efficiencies and economic drivers. The goal of this study is, firstly, to isolate and detail the key economic drivers and then find their efficient frontier. The methodology employed was Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) as a non-parametric and linear programming model. It provides relative measures of efficiency using multiple inputs and outputs for a given Decision-Making Unit (DMU) without requiring a prior production function. The number of variables in this study was limited in function of the DMUs analyzed, which consisted of the following Brazilian airports: Congonhas Airport (CGH), Guarulhos International Airport (GRU) and Viracopos International Airport (VCP). Two of the airports, GRU and VCP, were found to be efficient considering this study’s combination of very limited variables, meaning that theses airports, from this isolated standpoint, are maximizing their commercial, passenger parking and marketing revenues, given their terminal area and the number of yearly passengers.

Aggregate production planning has attracted the attention of researchers for quite a long time now; and the continued researches depict the significance and scope for improvement in this arena. Here, a multi-product, multi-level and multi-period model has been formulated to identify the required aggregate plan for meeting the forecast demand, by regulating production rates, inventory, workforce, various production costs, and other controllable variables. Several new contributing factors, such as costs related to material handling, raw material inventory and worker training have been included in the objective function and constraint equations to make the model more realistic. A case study has been presented for a cosmetics and toiletries manufacturer in Bangladesh. Eventually, the problem has been solved using Genetic Algorithm and Particle Swarm Optimization approach. The solution illustrates that the model can be applied in a real world scenario to enhance productivity and profitability.

Global operations are subject to considerable uncertainties. Due to the Trade Facilitation Agreement that became effective in February 2017, the study of measures to streamline customs controls is urgent. This study aims to assess the impact of trade facilitation measures on import flows. An experimental study was performed in the largest cargo airport in South America through discrete-event simulation and design of experiments. Operation impacts of three trade facilitation measures are assessed on import flow by air. We shed light in the following trade facilitation measures: the use of X-ray equipment for physical inspection; increase of the number of qualified companies in the trade facilitation program; performance targets for customs officials. All trade facilitation measures used indicated potential to provide more predictability, cost savings, time reduction, and increase in security in international supply chain.

This paper presents three approaches to support decision-making for production planning, sales and inventory problems. They work in a situation with: non-stationary probabilistic demand; production capacity in regular hours and overtime; shortage leads to lost sales; limited internal storage space; and ordering costs resulting from machine preparation are negligible. In the first approach, we consider the problem as linear and deterministic. In the second, safety inventories are used to fill a probabilistic demand, but the possibility of stockout is not considered. The third approach estimates shortage resulting from demand uncertainty. The last two approaches use iterative processes to re-estimate unit holding cost, which is the basis to calculate safety inventories in each period of the horizon. Using Microsoft Excel Solver, with linear programming and nonlinear search functions, a hypothetical example (but strongly based on real-life companies) and some scenarios permit concluding that developing more realistic and complex models may not provide significant benefits.

Editorial Information 2016

An introduction of the Special Issue on supply chain and logistics management for a more sustainable society.

A large number of real-life optimization problems in economics and business are complex and difficult to solve. Among the solutions techniques available in the Management Sciences, Discrete-Event computer Simulation (DES) can be considered as one of the most preferred by practitioners. DES has been used as an analysis tool to evaluate new production system concepts, and has also been used in the operation and planning of manufacturing facilities. In this paper, we propose to apply DES for the analysis of a tannery manufacturing facility. The objective is to analyze the current performance of the production system in order to propose alternatives for improvement, as well as optimum parameters for production. Results obtained showed the advantages of using such a quantitative decision-aid technique by capturing most of the complexity characteristics of the production process.

Additive manufacturing has become one of the most important technologies in the manufacturing field. Full implementation of additive manufacturing will change many well-known management practices in the production sector. However, theoretical development in the field of additive manufacturing with regard to its impact on supply chain management is rare. While additive manufacturing is believed to revolutionize and enhance traditional manufacturing, there is no comprehensive toolset developed in the manufacturing field to assess the impact of additive manufacturing and determine the best production method that suits the applied supply chain strategy. A significant portion of the existing supply chain methods and frameworks were adopted in this study to examine the implementation of additive manufacturing in supply chain management. The aim of this study is to develop a framework to explain when additive manufacturing impacts supply chain management efficiently.

Social issues are under-represented in sustainability, considering historical predominance of economic and environmental issues. This also applies to Sustainable Supply Chain Management. Even with its definition clarified regarding Triple Bottom Line, research still advances disproportionately in environmental and economic dimensions, facing the social dimension. This research aims to analyze how social sustainability is addressed in focal firms and managed into its supply chain. The study explores the concepts of social issues and governance mechanisms, presenting elements discussed in the literature. A framework for managing social sustainability in supply chains is presented, followed by a case to illustrate the discussed concepts in a Latin American context.