Trading is the most sensitive sector of the economy, directly and indirectly responding to innovative challenges. High competition, political risks and planetary scales have made it susceptible to any globalization fluctuations. Effective management is seen as the most important opportunity to gain competitive advantage. This explains the increased interest in the system of indicators of management system evaluation in the business processes in the supply chains. The aim of this paper is to develop and substantiate analytical approaches to the study of the status of transnational trade economic relationships with the identification of significant impact indicators and vulnerability indicators. The globalization aspect of the existing trend of world trade (export-import) among differentiated groups of countries is justified, distinguishing the forecast component. A two-tier model of business process “reliability management” has been constructed, taking into account the results of linear regression models based on the profiles of Australia and New Zealand.

This paper presents the problem of redesigning a supply network of large scale by considering variability of the demand. The central problematic takes root in determining strategic decisions of closing and adjusting of capacity of some network echelons and the tactical decisions concerning to the distribution channels used for transporting products. We have formulated a deterministic Mixed Integer Linear Programming Model (MILP) and a stochastic MILP model (SMILP) whose objective functions are the maximization of the EBITDA (Earnings before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization). The decisions of Network Design on stochastic model as capacities, number of warehouses in operation, material and product flows between echelons, are determined in a single stage by defining an objective function that penalizes unsatisfied demand and surplus of demand due to demand changes. The solution strategy adopted for the stochastic model is a scheme denominated as Sample Average Approximation (SAA). The model is based on the case of a Colombian company dedicated to production and marketing of foodstuffs and supplies for the bakery industry. The results show that the proposed methodology was a solid reference for decision support regarding to the supply networks redesign by considering the expected economic contribution of products and variability of the demand.

This paper analyzes the integration of two combinatorial problems that frequently arise in production and distribution systems. One is the Bin Packing Problem (BPP) problem, which involves finding an ordering of some objects of different volumes to be packed into the minimal number of containers of the same or different size. An optimal solution to this NP-Hard problem can be approximated by means of meta-heuristic methods. On the other hand, we consider the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (CVRPTW), which is a variant of the Travelling Salesman Problem (again a NP-Hard problem) with extra constraints. Here we model those two problems in a single framework and use an evolutionary meta-heuristics to solve them jointly. Furthermore, we use data from a real world company as a test-bed for the method introduced here.

Construction projects are conventionally analyzed considering factors such as cost and completion time. The present paper focuses on the projects particularly dealing with the house or building. The paper aims at an objective of introducing a synergy between project and supply chain management. After a brief relevant literature review, major construction activities have been discussed and the associated synergy between project management and supply chain concepts has been explained. Applications of the supply chain concepts such as forward and reverse logistics along with the customer order decoupling point in the context of construction management are discussed as a result of the proposed development. For this purpose, a categorization of construction product is developed on the basis of land and building characteristics and it is the major contribution of the present paper. This is also expected to be useful for estimating lead time and availability of the product in the context of relevant supply chain, and an associated managerial implication.

This paper presents a study to investigate the effects of outsourcing logistics on improvement of export activities in minerals firms. The proposed study designs a questionnaire with 20 questions in Likert scale and distributes it among 67 firms out of 81 active organizations, which are responsible for exporting minerals in province of Tehran, Iran. Using structural equation modeling, the study has determined that there was a meaningful relationship between strategic orientations of exporters against outsourcing third part logistics (3PL) and basic and additional capabilities of 3PL. In addition, there was a meaningful relationship between basic capabilities of 3PL and competitive advantage of exporters but there was not any meaningful relationship between additional capabilities of 3PL and competitive advantage of exporters. Finally, there was a meaningful relationship between competitive advantage of exporters and performance of exports. In summary, the survey indicates that the outsourcing logistics influences positively on the performance of minerals firms.

Location-routing problem (LRP) is established as a new research area in the context of location analysis. The primary concern of LRP is on locating facilities and routing of vehicles among established facilities and existing demand points. In this work, we address the capacitated LRP which arises in many practical applications within logistics and supply chain management. The objective is to minimize the overall system costs which include the fixed costs of opening depots and using vehicles at each depot site, and the variable costs associated with delivery activities. A novel heuristic is proposed which is based on variable neighborhood descent (VND) algorithm to solve the resulted problem. The computational study indicates that the proposed VND based heuristic is highly competitive with the existing solution algorithms in terms of solution quality.

Distribution refers to the steps taken to move and store a product from the suppliers to a customers in the supply chain and is a key driver of the overall profitability of a firm and overall supply chain. In this paper, a problem regarding managing of the move and store of goods are articulated and a mathematical model is presented to solve the model. The objective function is the total costs of distribution network, including transportation, storage rental, general warehousing, goods damages due to the transportation and storage, procurement, packing, and finally loading and unloading costs. The cost components described are defined based on the assumptions for a real distribution network of a chain stores firm. The aim of developing such a model is to find the optimum pattern to move and store goods based on the minimum cost of the distribution network.

Supply chain management (SCM) is the active centralize of a business' supply related activities to increase customer value and enhance a competitive advantage in the marketplace. SCM in-cludes various efforts by suppliers to implement and effective supply chains which are as eco-nomical as possible. Supply chain includes several issues from production, to product develop-ment, to the information systems required to direct these undertakings. This paper presents recent advances of supply chain management and issues related in Canadian industries. According to our survey, trust is an important part of the supply chain and business partners. The study also discusses different challenges for the implementation of SCM in Canadian small and medium en-terprises.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is the integrated management of core business processes, of-ten in real-time and mediated by software and technology. ERP gives us an integrated and updated image of core business processes based on common databases retained by a database man-agement system. ERP systems are able to track business resources including cash, raw materials, production capacity and the status of business commitments such as orders, purchase orders, and payroll. This paper presents different experiences of the implementation of ERP in Canada.