Abstract

This paper studies a periodic-review dual-sourcing inventory system with demand and supply capacity uncertainty. Compared with dual-sourcing models with deterministic supply capacities, a challenge here is that the objective functions in the dynamic programming recursions are not convex in the ordering quantities. To address this challenge, a powerful transformation technique is developed which converts a non- convex minimization problem to an equivalent convex minimization problem. In addition, the transformation preserves L\-convexity, allowing one to derive structural properties of the optimal policies for the dual-sourcing problem with random supply capacity. Dual-index policies are shown to be optimal under certain conditions. The effects of supply capacity uncertainties on the system performance are investigated.

Integrated Risk Management in Supply Chains

Integrated Risk Management in Supply Chains examines supply chain risk management. The increased interest in the topic is due to a number of factors including the increased volatility of commodity prices and exchange rates, recent natural disasters, and the increased importance of multinational corporations. The motivation for risk management comes from a variety of sources: financial distress costs, managerial incentives, and other important reasons discussed in the remainder of this book. Understanding the motives is important because they provide insights into which risks should be managed and how a firm’s risk management operations should be organized.

The first part examines Buffering Supply Chain Risk with Operational Flexibility and deals with uncertainty in the form of routine variability, which includes fluctuations in demand. Part 2 reviews Supply Disruption. Both the preponderance of natural disasters and huge economic swings can cause extreme challenges across the supply chains. Although these types of risks are rare, they are highly consequential and buffering is insufficient to mitigate them. Instead, firms facing these risks must engage in contingency planning and must maintain redundancies in the system. This is why contingency planning is on the interface of operations and finance. Part 3 looks at Commodity Price Risks, which includes five papers on managing price risks – the first three papers are fundamental in that they ask “when” and “how” firms should manage price risks with hedging and how hedging affects operating policy and the remaining two papers examine the best practices in specific industries.