Measuring and controlling complexity growth.
Supply chain and complexity management lab (sc​​2m lab) is housed at Kedge Business School and has its doors open for helping you to manage your supply chain, understand the trade-offs involved in each step of supply chains' processes, and keep the level of complexity under check.
When customers are sensitive to service delays, sensitive to the time to go to/from a service facility, and service facilities network are re-designed to increase the return-on-investment then, what happens when decision makers optimally re-designing a retail network?
Over-invest in stores’ capacity and increase their number leading to smaller amount of lost sales and increased customer satisfaction.
Keep capacities more-or-less the same but increase the number of them to get closer to customers and increase the revenue stream.
Surprisingly, pressure for increasing RoI (retun-on-investment) leads to opening less facilities and investing less on their capacities. The result is an increase of lost sales which implies in a reduction of the revenue stream (which is bad for profitability and seems to hurt RoI) but because it reduces even more the investment than reduces the revenue, the overall effect is an increase of the total RoI and an increase of Gross Margins at the expense of a reduction in the total profitability.
Other side-effects include potential loss of market share. Designing a network with such objectives needs to be taken with care specially if each store is operated by a franchisee who locks in a particular catchment area and makes difficult further plans expansions once the pressure on RoI decreases and profitability start to guide decisions. Answer 1 is the right answer.
We develop models aiming support decision makers when addressing strategic decisions. Our work covers descriptive models (revealing what is going on), predictive models (what will happen), and prescriptive models (what we should do to impact the future in our beneft).
CooperAction is an applied research process aimed to solve real industry problem. Decision makers identify opportunities for improvement in their own firms for, together with the ​​​sc2m lab's personnel, develop a full plan for addressing the issue. Housed at Kedge Business School's Center for Supply Chain Excellence (CESIT) ​sc2m lab is ready to create an all inclusive package that may include consulting, advising, training, etc.
Building up on a strong link to the ​​ ISLI Program at Kedge business school, the sc2m lab has easy access to a qualified pool of young and mature professionals in supply chain management. In addition, the CESIT has another four sisters' labs that complement this lab's capabilities.
Once a firm identify a challenge it wants to address, the ​​sc2m lab is ready to train managers on subjects related to the challenge under consideration using a pool of experts and advanced training tools, which includes sophisticated simulation tools, that helps to bridge the gap between theory and best practices.
Specific challenges may need greater involvement from the lab's experts through ​consulting or, if the needs arew for a less close follow up the those experts may p (CESIT) ​sc2m lab is ready provide advising as needed.
CESIT, through the ​sc2m lab is has access to some of the best students in Supply Chain Management in France. The ISLI program, with its internation reputation, attracts the best of supply chain students and those students may be coached on the specifics of the challenges in order to have a warm start if the firm needs their services.
Our lab also performs audits, with or without participation of students, in order to assess, among other things, companies' supply chain capabilities and use of best practices. Finally, we serve as platform for connecting together companies across a range of industries that are experiencing similar situations or facing similar challenges. The platforms are a forum for debating latest technique and approaches and sharing success stories.
Although we aim to solve problems in a large range of supply chain problems, which includes, inventory, facility, transportation, outsourcing, complexity, systems, and production processes among others, our focus is mostly on strategic level problems. Watson(2013) remind us that experts have been saying that supply chains' costs locked in at the time of deciding the location of the facilities may reach 80% of total costs. Our own experience corroborates that number.
Therefore our goal is provide support to managers on strategic and tactical decision making processes. We would like to add value to those process when they refere to the topics presented on the right.
Where to locate my new facility(ies)? What should be the size of the facility?
Is my supply chain design supporting near-optimal operating performace? Should I revisit my design decisions in the first place?
Should I outsource that particular function? What are the risks involved? What would be the benefits involved?
Do I have the right fleet size? Does my fleet has the right capacity allocation?
Is my inventory policy aligned with my supply chain strategy?
Is my organization well balanced with respect to complexity?
My long term-plan calls for an increase of numbers of SKUs, is that SKU proliferation likely to hurt the supply chain's performance?
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The sc2m lab has a small team of researchers from Kedge Business School that is reinforced with affiliated members from several institutions from several European and North American institutions.
The team is further enlarged by a strong group of its members' co-authors.
Dr. Mozart Menezes is a senior professor at Kedge Business School – Bordeaux, after working within the faculty group at Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary. Prior to that he was a Professor of Supply Chain Management and PhD Program Director at the Zaragoza Logistics Center; faculty member in the Operations Management and Logistics Department at HEC School of Management – Paris. He has been also a Research Affiliate at the Center for Transportation and Logistics at MIT.
Dr. Menezes worked for several years as Operations Manager at Procter & Gamble in Brazil. He has done projects as consultant or supervising students to many companies including Alcatel-Lucent, Casino Group, City of Calgary, Environmental Research Systems, General Motors, Imaginarium, Medecins sans Frontieres, SaicaNatur, Solutia, and Telefonica. For many of those firms he has done, and continue doing, dozen of projects.
He obtained a BSc degree in Civil Engineering from the Universidade Federal do Para, Belém, Brazil. Dr. Menezes received an MSc degree in Civil Engineering specializing in Project Management and an MSc degree in Industrial Administration from Clemson University, USA. He received a PhD degree in Operations Management from the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Canada. His research areas of interest include Supply Chain Network Design, Supply Chain Disruptions, Facility Location, Supply Chain Management, Social Network Influences on Operations, Social Choice and Workforce Management.
His areas of research and teaching interests are design and management of supply chains, strategy of distribution logistics networks, and supply chain simulation. He was the principal author of several scientific articles published in international journals. As a researcher in the field of supply chain management, he is extremely familiar with different implementation of inventory policies and analysis of forecasting methods, and can identify several transportation and distribution strategies.
Moreover, Mehdi worked in a management consulting company and supervised several managerial and organisational projects. He also worked in subsidiaries of IKCO, the largest automotive manufacturer in the Middle East, at joint venture with the Peugeot, Renault, Kia, and Valeo. Additionally, I had work experience, as a qualified distribution analyst, at Golestan, a widespread retail chain in the emerging market of Iran.
Diego Ruiz-Hernández is Associate Professor at the University College for Financial Studies and head of the Department of Quantitative Methods. He is also visiting scholar at Kedge Business School where he has taught master courses in Operational Logistics Management and Inventory Management. He has developed his academic career at the following centres: Universidad de Navarra (2006-2009), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (1998-2009), and CUNEF (2009 to this date); and has been visiting scholar at the universities of Edinburgh, Strathclyde and Lancaster in the United Kingdom.
He obtained a BSc. Degree in Economics and a post-graduate Diploma in Econometrics. Later on he obtained an M.A. in Economics and a M.Sc. in Business. He obtained his PhD. in Operational Research from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Catalonia, working in stochastic scheduling and dynamic allocation problems.
Diego’s research covers, but is not limited to, fields in the areas of combinatorial optimization, discrete and network location, mathematical programming, Markovian decision problems, stochastic dynamic programming and, in general, the application of mathematical optimisation techniques to decision making in service and industry. He has published scientific articles in international journals as Annals of Operations Research, Computers and Operations Research, the European Journal of Operational Research, or Transportation Research B, among others.
He is member of the Catalan Statistics Society (SCE); the Operational Research Society of the United Kingdom (OR); the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS); the Spanish Association of Statistics and Operational Research (SEIO); the European Working Groups on Locational Analysis (EWGLA) and Stochastic Programming (EWG Stoch. Prog.); and the Spanish Network on Locational Analysis and Related Problems (RedLoca). He is founder and responsible of CUNEF-Ingenium Research Group and leads the CUNEF-MOBS project..
The literature discussed in this webpage is presented below.
Watson (2013): M. Watson. Supply chain network design: applying optimization and analytics to the global supply chain. Pearson Education, 2013.