In a decentralized supply chain, most of the supply chain agents may not share information due to confidentiality policies, quality of information, or different system incompatibilities. Every actor holds its own set of information and attempts to maximize its objective (minimizing costs/minimizing inventory holdings) based on the available settings. Therefore, the agents control their own activities with the objective of improving their own competitiveness, which leads them to make decisions that maximize their local performance by ignoring the other agents or even the final consumer. These decisions are myopic because they do not consider the performance of all the partners to satisfy the consumer. Demand Forecasting and Order Planning in Supply Chains and Humanitarian Logistics is a collection of innovative research that focuses on demand anticipation, forecasting, and order planning as well as humanitarian logistics to propose original solutions for existing problems. While highlighting topics including artificial intelligence, information sharing, and operations management, this book is ideally designed for supply chain managers, logistics personnel, business executives, management experts, operation industry professionals, academicians, researchers, and students who want to improve their understanding of supply chain coordination in order to be competitive in the new era of globalization.

Imagine planning an event like the Olympics. Now imagine planning the same event but not knowing when or where it will take place, or how many will attend. This is what humanitarian logisticians are up against. Oversights result in serious consequences for the victims of disasters. So they have to get it right, fast.

Focusing on the specific challenges of research design and exploring the opportunities of conducting research in humanitarian logistics and supply chain management, this handbook is a significant contribution to future research. Chapters include extensive descriptions of methods used, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages, and the challenges in scoping, sampling, collecting and analysing data, as well as ensuring the quality of studies. Covering a wide variety of topics including risk and resilience and the impact of humanitarian logistics on capacity building, sustainability and the local economy, it also explores the need for scalability and co-ordination in the humanitarian network. Contributors provide important insight on future directions and offer crucial guidance for researchers conducting projects within the field.

A supply chain comprises different actors existing in different countries, including suppliers, producers, and customers. Clothes are supplied from Asia to all other regions; most coffee beans are supplied from South America; and cocoa is produced in Africa. Protecting the rights of people who produce goods in different countries is essential. In fact, according to this evolutionary law, companies need to identify, analyze, and prioritize the risks in their supply chains, and new policies must be established based on these results. New measures are taken to prevent or minimize violations of human rights and damage to the environment. Companies also need to set up grievance channels for people in the supply chains for regular reporting on supply chain practices. The German Supply Chain Act gives consumers the security that companies are managed based on fair production, and many similar legislations are likely to follow in other nations. Businesses around the world must prepare for these types of policies to impact their own supply chain management strategy before they are enforced if they wish to avoid revenue-impacting delays. Government Impact on Sustainable and Responsible Supply Chain Management is edited by Atour Taghipour, with about a decade of experience as a director in Automobile and High-Tech Industries, provides new and innovative ways to integrate social and environmental analysis into global value chains and adapt the law that regulates corporate responsibility for the observance of sustainability and human rights in the supply chain. This book is ideal for professionals and researchers working in governmental and private organizations in supply chain management, operations management, logistics, and operations research. Moreover, the book provides insights and support for executives in managing expertise, knowledge, information, and organizational development in different work communities and environments.

Written by supply chain researchers, consultants, and practitioners, this book explains the newly emerging techniques and practices for highly efficient supply chain management, made possible by the rapid progress in information and communication technologies.

This work encapsulates the essential developments in this field into a single resource, as well as to set an agenda for further development in the field. This brief focuses on the demand flexibility in supply chains with fragmented results distributed throughout the literature. These results have strong implications for managing real-world complex operations planning problems. This book exploits dimensions of demand flexibility in supply chains and characterizes the best fit between demand properties and operations capabilities and constraints. The origins and seminal works are traced in integrated demand and operations planning and an in-depth documentation is provided for the current state of the art. Systems with inherent costs and constraints that must respond to some set of demands at a minimum cost are examined. Crucial unanswered questions are explored and the high-value research directions are highlighted for both practice and for the development of new and interesting optimization models and algorithms.

During global crises, apart from humanitarian concerns, at the economic level, supply chains around the world can be impacted. These crises can cause huge uncertainties in both the supply and demand parts of supply chains. On one side, the demand for some products and services can be reduced. On the other side, manufacturers around the world are facing shortages of supplies of raw materials and parts because of interruptions in production, disruptions to transportation, and labor shortages. In this context, organizations start to re-examine their production and service systems based on digitization of operations to not only mitigate the risk but also to build a resilient supply chain while continuing to reduce costs and maximize profits. The question that can be asked is how the decentralized supply chains can integrate new technologies to compete in a risky environment in global crises. Digitalization of Decentralized Supply Chains During Global Crises provides new approaches of digitalization of decentralized supply chains and industries to help researchers, educators, consultants, and practitioners deal with global crises and improve the global performance of supply chains. Important topics covered include blockchain, internet of things, 3D technologies, and Industry 4.0 technologies within the context of digital supply chains. This book is important for supply chain managers, manufacturers, producers, logistics personnel, economists, practitioners, stakeholders, researchers, academicians, and students.