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                 Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management

                              The Chinese University of Hong Kong

 

 

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Date: Friday, December 12, 2014 - 11:00am - 12:30pm

 

Speaker: Professor Candace Yano, Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR) and the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley

 

Title: Mitigating the Bullwhip Effect in Multi-Product Systems with Uncertain Demand Facing Inflexible Production Schedules and Transportation Economies of Scale

 

Abstract:

This research was motivated by a problem facing a large manufacturer of frozen snack foods.  The manufacturer's production schedule is fairly inflexible due to high utilization of the costly processing equipment and significant changeover times between products.  The manufacturer provides vendor-managed inventory services to large retail chains, which provides good visibility of demand at these chains.  Most of the remaining sales are to distributors that order somewhat unpredictably because of their desire to achieve economies of scale in transportation, and then sell the products to small retailers.  We present a new inventory control policy that enables the distributors to implement fixed-interval ordering while still achieving the desired economies of scale in transportation and show numerically that the distributor?s total cost under this policy is essentially the same as the cost under a variable-interval ordering policy.  We then present a methodology for evaluating the cost savings that can be achieved by the manufacturer if he can convince the distributors to switch to the new policy.  The savings are often substantial, indicating that the manufacturer could pass some of the cost savings to the distributors as an inducement to adopt the new policy.

 

This is joint work with doctoral student Kai-Chuan Yang.

 

Biography:

Candace ("Candi") Yano is a Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR) and the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, California. From 1995 to 2001, she served as Chair of the IEOR Department and is currently Group Chair for the Operations and Information Technology Management Group at Haas. She holds an A.B. in Economics, a M.S. in Operations Research, and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University. Prior to joining the University of California, she held positions as a Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories and as a faculty member in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan. Professor Yano's primary research interests are production, inventory and logistics management, particularly on how to deal with various sources of uncertainty in these contexts, as well as interdisciplinary problems involving manufacturing and marketing. She has authored or co-authored over 70 articles and book chapters on these subjects and is the recipient of several National Science Foundation grants. Her research also has been supported by grants from Ford Motor Company, Chrysler Corporation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Joint Genome Sequencing Institute of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, among others. She has served as the Editor-in-Chief of IIE Transactions and Department Editor (Operations and Supply Chains) for Management Science, as well as in various editorial capacities for Operations Research, Interfaces, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, and Naval Research Logistics, among others. She has been active in the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) as initiator of the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society and co-organizer of the group?s first conference, cofounder of the Women in OR/MS Forum, chair of the Job Placement Committee, Program Chair for the 2002 Annual Conference in San Jose, Vice President of Marketing and Outreach, General Chair for the 2014 Annual Conference in San Francisco, and a frequent participant in the Future Academician (Doctoral) Colloquium. Professor Yano was the recipient of a Chancellor's Professorship at UC Berkeley from 1997 to 2000, and is a Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences as well as the Institute of Industrial Engineers.

 

Everyone is welcome to attend the talk!

 

Venue: Room 14-222, 14/F, Academic 3, City University of Hong Kong

 

This is a Joint Seminar by Department of Management Sciences at CityU and Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management at CUHK.

 

SEEM-5201 Website: http://seminar.se.cuhk.edu.hk

Email: seem5201@se.cuhk.edu.hk