Supply chain games: Operations management and risk valuation (Q939602)

In the global economy of our days, supply chains are an essential ingredient to corporate survival and growth. Operations strategy in supply chains must assume an ever-expanding and strategic role of risks that modern enterprises face when they operate in an interdependent supply chain environment. These operational and strategic facets imply a brand new set of operational problems and risks that have not always been understood or managed very well. It falls therefore to supply chain managers to identify and educate corporate managers on what these critical operational problems and risks involve. The purpose of this book is to consider these problems in depth and to draw essential conclusions regarding their management in supply chains. Moreover, the book examines traditional operational problems expressed in a strategic and inter-temporal context that recognises the complexity and interdependency of firms in a supply-chain environment. Application examples, extensively used throughout the book, illustrate all the aspects of dealing with and solving such kinds of problems, and make it suitable for students in logistics, risk engineering and economics as well as business school graduates and practitioners, since it provides them with the means to understand, model and analyse some of the aforementioned outstanding issues and problems currently faced in managing supply chains. The content of the book is organised in three parts, each of which emphasises important facets of supply chain management operations. The first part that is ``Supply Chains and Operations Modelling and Management'' provides static and discrete-time models and their gradual extension to a supply chain environment highlighting the new concerns of the supply chain environment. The second part that is ``Intertemporal Supply Chains Management'' addresses essentially inter-temporal problems as differential games, presented as natural continuous-time extensions of the corresponding static models, so that the effect of various types of dynamics on supply chains can be assessed and insights gained. Finally, the third part of the book that is ``Risk and Supply Chain Management'' deals with risk and supply chains as well as with numerous applications to the management of quality in a supply chain environment and in managing interdependent, in both the substance and the decision-making, operations. In this sense, the book highlights and resolves some important problems that address directly the needs and the complexity of supply chain management in a tractable and strategic setting.