2018 International Workshop on Intelligent Supply Chain Management
Venue: Room 1102, Library & Information Center Building C, Zijingang Campus
Agenda:
| Keynote Speakers | Speech |
8:30—8:35 | Vice Dean & Prof. Weihua Zhou | Opening remarks |
8:35—9:35 | Prof. Yun-Fong Lim Singapore Management University | Matching Supply with Demand for Online Retailing |
9:40-10:40 | Prof. Pengfei Guo Hong Kong Polytechnic University of Technology | On the Benefit of Privatization in a Mixed Duopoly Service System |
10:45-11:45 | Prof. Tao Li Santa Clara University | A Responsive-Pricing Retailer Sourcing from Competing Suppliers Facing Disruptions |
11:55-12:30 | Summary | |
Keynote Speech:
Matching Supply with Demand for Online Retailing
Speaker: Prof. Yun-Fong Lim, Singapore Management University
Yun Fong LIM is Associate Professor of Operations Management and Lee Kong Chian Fellow at the Lee Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore Management University (SMU). He is also Chang Jiang Chaired Professor and has been an NOL Fellow. Yun Fong’s research has appeared in Operations Research, Management Science, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, and Production and Operations Management. He has delivered keynote and plenary speeches in several international conferences. In addition, his work has received funding by MOE and A*STAR and media coverage by The Business Times, Capital 95.8, and 93.8 Live. His current research interests include e-commerce and marketplace analytics, inventory management, warehousing and fulfillment, sustainable urban logistics, and flexible workforce and resource management.
Yun Fong is a recipient of the SMU Teaching Excellence Innovative Teacher Award. He teaches both undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Operations Management. He has provided consulting and executive development to corporations such as Maersk, McMaster-Carr Company, Resorts World Sentosa, Schneider Electrics, Temasek Holdings, and Zalora. Yun Fong obtained both his PhD and MSc degrees in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Abstract:
The aggressive expansion in e-commerce sales, which will amount to $4.058 trillion by 2020 (eMarketer, 2016), creates greater challenges to the online retailers' operations. An important characteristic that differentiates online retailers from brick-and-mortar retailers is that the former can choose which fulfillment centers (FCs) to satisfy demand. Although this flexibility improves service levels, it may increase the fulfillment cost and complicates inventory allocation and replenishments to the FCs. Therefore, we consider a joint replenishment, allocation, and fulfillment (JRAF) problem over multiple periods: In each period, an online retailer determines the replenishment quantity for each product from each supplier and then allocates the inventory to the FCs. After the demand is realized, the retailer chooses the FCs to satisfy it. The retailer’s objective is to minimize the expected total cost. The JRAF problem is generally intractable due to stochastic demand, which motivates us to develop a two-stage approach based on robust optimization to solve it. The first stage is to decide whether a product should be replenished from each supplier in each period (a binary decision). We pass these binary decisions to the second stage, where we determine the replenishment, allocation, and fulfillment quantities. A case study with a major apparel online retailer in Asia suggests that the two-stage approach can reduce the retailer’s current cost by 36.73%, demonstrating a significant value of joint optimization. A more general study confirms that the two-stage approach can handle realistic problem sizes and performs very close to a benchmark with perfect information. This is the first paper that integrates the replenishment, allocation, and fulfillment decisions in one model and our novel methodology can solve real-size problem instances (up to 1,000 products) of online retailing.Management, and Production and Operations Management. He has delivered keynote and plenary speeches in several international conferences. In addition, his work has received funding by MOE and A*STAR and media coverage by The Business Times, Capital 95.8, and 93.8 Live. His current research interests include e-commerce and marketplace analytics, inventory management, warehousing and fulfillment, sustainable urban logistics, and flexible workforce and resource management.
Keynote Speech:
On the Benefit of Privatization in a Mixed Duopoly Service System
Speaker: Prof. Pengfei Guo, Hong Kong Polytechnic University of Technology
Pengfei Guo is current a full professor of the Department of Logistics and Maritime Studies, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He joined Hong Kong PolyU in 2007, after having obtained his Ph.D. degree in business administration from Duke University. He got a bachelor degree from Xi’an Jiaotong University and a master degree from Shanghai Jiaotong University. His main research interest is on the design and control of service systems with strategic customers and he is also interested in inventory and supply chain management. He has published 30 papers and 12 of them are published on UTD journals such as Management Science, Operations Research, M&SOM and POM. He is currently serving as a senior editor for the POM journal.
Abstract:
We consider a mixed duopoly service system in which a profit-maximizing private service provider (SP) competes against a welfare-maximizing public SP (or equivalently, a social planner). The two SPs’ service quality is differentiated and customers are heterogeneous on quality taste. We first consider the scenario where premium service is provided by the private SP and the regular one by the public SP. We show that welfare can be improved if the public SP is privatized and there exists an optimal level of privatization for the public SP in terms of welfare maximization; under some conditions, full privatization is optimal. We then extend our analysis to the other scenario where the premium service is provided by the public SP and the regular one by the private SP, and obtain similar findings. By comparing the maximal welfare of the two scenarios, we find that the latter scenario prevails when the service rate or/and the service quality of the premium service is/are relatively high. Furthermore, under the prevailed scenario, partial privatization is adopted.
Keynote Speech:
A Responsive-Pricing Retailer Sourcing from Competing Suppliers Facing Disruptions
Speaker: Prof. Tao Li, Santa Clara University
Tao Li is an associate professor with tenure at Santa Clara University. He joined the Operations Management & Information Systems department in the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University in Fall 2012 as an assistant professor. Professor Li’s research interests include supply chain management with a special emphasis on sourcing strategy with unreliable suppliers, supply chain coordination, and the operations-marketing interface. His scholarship has appeared in leading academic journals such as Production and Operations Management, European Journal of Operational Research. His scholarship has been supported by the Santa Clara University Research Grant, the Leavey Research Grant, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China. He is the recipient of the Leavey School of Business Extraordinary Research Award.
Professor Li received a B.S. in material science and engineering, and a B.S. in financial management, as well as his M.S. in management science and engineering from Tianjin University (China). In addition, he received the MBA and M.S. in supply chain management from The University of Texas at Dallas, where he earned his Ph.D. in 2012.
Professor Li serves as a Senior Editor and a member of Editorial Review Board for Production and Operations Management and the treasurer of the Chinese Scholars Association for Management Science and Engineering. He has been a regular reviewer for top journals including Management Science, Operations Research, and Manufacturing & Service Operations Management.
Abstract:
We study a problem of a retailer who orders from two competing strategic suppliers subject to independent or correlated disruptions and responds by setting the retail price upon delivery, which we call responsive-pricing. The suppliers compete by setting their wholesale prices. We model this problem as a Stackelberg-Nash game with the suppliers as the leaders and the retailer as the follower, and obtain its equilibrium explicitly. We perform sensitivity analyses with respect to suppliers' production costs, reliabilities, and their correlation. Surprisingly, we find that an increase in the reliability of a supplier may, counter to our intuition, hurt him due to responsive-pricing. Furthermore, in contrast to literature, we find that a high disruption correlation may benefit a supplier who has a cost advantage, because of responsive-pricing, and total order quantity may increase in that correlation due to intense suppliers competition. This paper has important implications for unreliable suppliers because how reliability and correlation influence their profits depends on the retailer's pricing power and the competition intensity between the suppliers. With a responsive-pricing retailer, a supplier may not benefit from a higher reliability but may benefit from a higher correlation. This explains why a supplier that has a cost advantage may have the incentive to create a positively correlated supply network by building plants in the same geographic location with his competitor, or choosing the same tier 2 supplier to form a diamond-shaped supply chain strategically.