Ramaswami Sridharan

• University of Newcastle Australia

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to assess the relationship between five green practices and firm performance. In addition, this paper investigates the influence of each green practice on environmental performance, economic benefits, and economic costs. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected based on a cross-sectional survey of owne...

Based on a systematic literature review of 76 operations and supply chain management journal articles, our purpose is to establish the current position on the dimensions of supply chain complexity, levels of analysis, and emerging complexity risks. We propose an agenda for future research that clarifies the distinction between dimensions of complex...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to propose a new model that is inclusive and practical because of the deficiencies in models for construct measurement. Further, the authors demonstrate the value of the proposed model by describing its application to the development and validation of a multi-dimensional construct, enviropreneurial orientation....

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to advance enviropreneurial orientation (EO) as a new internal driver for green supply chain practice adoption. Because manufacturing supply chains are major contributors to environmental pollution, green practice adoption is a means of reducing environmental pollution. However, why owner/managers adopt green...

Heavy equipment refers to heavy-duty vehicles that hold an important role in executing construction projects and production operations. The available literature lacks sufficient information to provide an understanding of the characteristics of the heavy equipment supply chain. The purpose of this research is to examine the heavy equipment supply ch...

While the study of flow has attracted the interest of scholars seeking to understand its nature and effects on consumption related behaviours, it has received limited attention from Internet researchers seeking to understand the relative role of flow in forming consumer loyalty and the functional form of flow's effect. The study uses two data sets...

Previous research indicates that power and trust play a critical role in creating a mutual competitive advantage of collaboration. Very often chain members exercise power in an opportunistic way to appropriate value for themselves rather than creating better value. The goal of this paper is to scrutinise the roles of power and trust in collaboratio...

Collaboration is a process in which participating members work together to improve overall performance. However, the participants often face conflicting interests that hamper the implementation of collaboration. This study aims at analysing the collaboration process between Coca-Cola and Carrefour. Graph model for conflict resolution (GMCR) and dra...

Collaboration often involves the interaction of multiple participants whose interests differ and hence are vulnerable to conflicts. The participants should explore new strategies for examining underlying assumptions during the interaction in order to reach a trustworthy agreement. However, there is a lack of understanding of how both emotive and ra...

This paper is carried out to empirically examine managerial perceptions on the relationship between supply chain collaboration practice and operational performance. The framework suggests that collaborative practice is characterised by three distinct factors: (1) decision synchronisation, (2) information sharing, and (3) incentive alignment, which...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to clarify the architecture of supply chain collaboration and to propose a design for supply chain collaboration (DfC), which enables participating members to create and develop key elements of the proposed architecture. Design/methodology/approach The paper offers a concept for designing the five elements of t...

Previous research often associates supply chain collaboration with interorganisational process improvements and the use of information systems to allow the chain members to effectively match demand with supply. However, it is argued that supply chain collaboration has multiple elements that determine the effectiveness of the chain members in provid...

Purpose This paper proposes an integrative framework for supply chain collaboration which is based on the reciprocal approach. Design/methodology/approach A reciprocal approach is adopted to capture the interaction phenomenon of different features of collaboration in attaining overall supply chain performance. Findings A collaborative supply chai...

Purpose – This study was conducted to examine supply chain discontent in an integrative way. Design/methodology/approach – The organisational economics view is adopted as an approach to reveal multiple sources of discontent which consist of incongruent objectives, disintegrated performance measures, unsynchronised decision-making, information asymm...

Purpose This paper proposes an instrument to measure the extent of collaboration in a supply chain consisting of two members, suppliers and retailers. Design/methodology/approach The proposed model for collaboration incorporates collaborative practices in information sharing, decision synchronisation and incentive alignment. A collaboration index...

Supply chain collaboration enables firms to achieve better performance. It requires close arrangements of collaborative practices among the participating members. Searching for better practices and ideas that lead to superior performance means that the chain members also need to benchmark their current collaborative practices to other collaborative...

Supply chain collaboration amongst independent firms often provides larger benefits from effectively satisfying end customer needs than working in isolation. However, a lack of awareness about the existence of constraints along the supply chain prevents the benefits of collaboration from being fully realised. This paper attempts to apply the theory...

Intense competition forces companies to become involved in supply chain collaboration with their upstream and downstream partners. The key to ensuring that the participating members are progressing on the right track of creating the best-in-class practice is to conduct benchmarking. Benchmarking stimulates collective learning for performance improv...

Increasing competition due to market globalisation, product diversity and technological breakthroughs stimulates independent firms to collaborate in a supply chain that allows them to gain mutual benefits. This requires the collective know-how of the coordination mode, including the ability to synchronise interdependent processes, to integrate info...

In this paper, we propose the problem of identifying a minimum-weight rooted not-necessarily-spanning arborescence (MRA) in a directed rooted acyclic graph with weights on arcs. We show this problem to be NP-hard and formulate it as a zero—one integer program. We develop a heuristic H to construct a rooted arborescence (RA) in a given graph G, givi...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review the fundamental concept of collaborative supply chain (CSC) and discuss the facts that a road to success in the process of design, implementation and operations of a supply chain is the identification of superior strategies and clear objectives. One of these strategies is known as CSC, that needs to...

A supply chain typically consists of interrelated members such as raw-material suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers who have different ranges of private information. Information sharing is a strategy for achieving cohesion of all functions amongst chain members, so as to provide adequate visibility to enable them make good decision...

In 1991, the World Bank was forced to appoint a team to con- duct an independent review of the human and environmental impact of a mega-dam and water-distribution project on the river Narmada in India. The review team asked us to help as- sess the problems caused by the 75,000-km canal network be- ing built for the project. We combined spreadsheet...

Manufacturing and retailing companies tend to collaborate in a supply chain to effectively match demand with supply. Although partnership in a supply chain promises advantages in the gaining of mutual benefits, those benefits are rarely realised due to differences of interests among its chain members. Identifying differences of interests that may p...

Consider a rooted acyclic graph G with weights on arcs. In this graph, a minimum weight rooted arborescence (MRC) can be defined as one whose sum of arc weights is less than or equal to that of any other rooted arborescence (RA) in that graph. We introduce a Lagrangian heuristic for this problem and present computational results. First, we formulat...

This paper provides a review of the various solution methods for the capacitated plant location problem. Heuristic and exact procedures, that have appeared in the literature, are covered. The review also examines two innovative concepts the Lagrangian heuristic and variable splitting, as proposed for the capacitated plant location problem.

In this paper we look at the Lagrangian relaxations of the Capacitated Plant Location Problem with Single Source constraints in terms of the bounds and solution techniques. We propose a heuristic based on a lagrangian relaxation of the problem. We also show how this heuristic can be used to solve other combinatorial problems that are related to thi...

The Managing Director of Pallavan Transport Corporation—the urban passenger road transport undertaking in Madras—is wondering how to chart a future path for the organization keeping in mind the twin objectives of being socially responsible as well as financially self-reliant. Readers are requested to send their responses on the case to Vikalpa offi...

The opening up of the Indian economy under the liberalized trade policy has made it imperative for many Indian manufacturers to become internationally competitive within the shortest possible time frame. This case deals with a similar situation faced by a pharmaceutical company which needs to come up with new strategic initiatives in the context of...

In a rooted acyclic graph, G, there exits, in general, several rooted (not necessarily spanning) arborscences. Depending on whether the graph has weights on nodes, on arcs, or on both, it is possible to define, with different objective functions, several different problems, each concerned with finding an optimal rooted arborscence in the graph unde...

In this paper we present a Lagrangian relaxation-based heuristic for solving the capacitated plantlocation problem with side constraints. The side constraints are upper-bound constraints on disjoint subsets of the (0-1) variables. Computational results are reported for some problems, having been obtained both on a mainframe computer and on a person...

Minimizing dead kilometres is an important operational objective of an urban road transport undertaking as dead kilometres mean additional losses. This can be achieved by formulating the underlying decision problem of allocating the buses to depots as a transportation problem. Using data from an urban road transport undertaking, R Sridharan shows h...

Approaches proposed in the literature for the Capacitated Plant Location Problem are compared. The comparison is based on new theoretical and computational results. The main emphasis is on relaxations. In particular, dominance relations among the various relaxations found in the literature are identified. In the computational study, the relaxations...

In this paper, we present a two-stage heuristic which identifies the most economical way to connect the nodes of a date communication network. We formulate this network design problem as a star-star concentrator location problem. To solve this problem, a Lagrangin relaxation procedure is proposed. The first stage of the procedure, namely the soluti...

In this paper we present a Lagrangian relaxation approach for solving the capacitated plant location problem with side constraints. The side constraints are upper bound constraints on disjoint subsets of the (0-1) variables. We also provide an application where this procedure can be used to solve a particular vehicle Routing Problem. Computational...

In this note we show that the worst case solutions of the weak linear programming relaxation, the DRDP heuristic and the ADD heauristic for the Capacitated Plant Problem are not good.

In this paper we look at the technological developments in telecommunications over the years and their implications to the society in which we live. We realise that in this ?Information Age? the World is only as far as the nearest telephone to us. But development also has its costs in terms of dwindling resources and reduction in privacy, both indi...

This is a comment on the paper “A heuristic Lagrangean relaxation algorithm for the capacitated plant location problem” by J. Barcelo and J. Casanovas. The authors have a single source version of the problem where they provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the feasibility of the problem. We show that the condition as shown by the authors...