Guest editorial

Citation

Singh, R.K. and Shankar, R. (2012), "Guest editorial", Journal of Modelling in Management, Vol. 7 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/jm2.2012.29707caa.001

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Modelling in Management, Volume 7, Issue 3

In present context of global competition, all organizations across the world are working hard to improve their performance in terms of product cost, product quality, mass customization and responsiveness. Many of the organizations have reached up to saturation in terms of different innovations and continuous improvement practices for their individual organization. However, tremendous scope is left for improvement in integrated value chain. Therefore, all of them have started thinking to integrate whole value chain starting from raw material supplier to end customer to maximize the value addition in their respective production systems. Nowadays, organizations are trying to work in form of highly integrated production system. In this changing paradigm for competitiveness, supply chain management has become integral part of strategy for most of the organizations irrespective of their size and location. Firm vs firm competition has been replaced by competition between the supply chains.

To sustain in such environment, supply chains need to be resilient and agile. Managing such supply chains involve inventory management, designing the supply contracts, selection of reliable suppliers, developing core competencies, outsourcing of non-core functions, distribution and production scheduling, logistic and network optimization, risks and disruptions management, selection of best 3 PL, reverse logistic, lean manufacturing and green supply chain issues, etc. Usually researchers have used survey based or case based approach to analyze these areas of supply chain management on individual basis. However, this approach has not been very useful to integrate complex situations in effective manner.

For optimization of complex supply chains under dynamic scenario, modeling has emerged important tool for many researchers in different areas of operations management and industrial engineering specifically. Considering the growing importance of modelling and simulation techniques, this special issue of Journal of Modelling in Management has tried to bring application of different advanced modeling techniques such as analytic network process, fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (fuzzy AHP) and TOPSIS, active queue management (AQM) algorithms, multi-objective particle swarm optimization algorithm, etc. in emerging areas of supply chain management. Guest editors are of the opinion that contributions made by learned researchers for this special issue will further motivate other researchers to apply these modeling techniques to solve complex supply chain problems of industry and academia.

Rajesh K. Singh and Ravi ShankarGuest Editors