To gain and sustain competitive advantage, health-care providers have to continuously review and renovate their operational and information technology (IT) strategies through collaborative and cooperative endeavour with their supply chain channel members. This paper explores new ways of enhancing a health-care organization's responsiveness to changes and increasing its competitiveness through implementing strategic information technology alliances among channel members in a health-care supply chain network. An overview of issues and problems (e.g. bullwhip effect, negative externalities and free-riding phenomenon in multichannel supply chains) presented in the health-care supply chains is first delineated. This paper further goes over the issues of health-care supply chain coordination and integration for strategic IT alliances, followed by the discussion of the spillover effect of IT investments. A number of viable IT practices (such as information sharing and Internet-enabled supply chain portal) for effective health-care supply chain collaboration and coordination are then examined in this research. Finally, the paper discusses how strategic IT alliances can help improve the effectiveness of health-care supply chain management.

This study reports the transformations between the third-order Eulerian and Lagrangian solutions for the standing gravity waves on water of uniform depth. Regarding the motion of a marked fluid particle, the instantaneous velocity, the mass conservation and the free surface must be the same for either Eulerian or Lagrangian methods. We impose the assumption that the Lagrangian wave frequency is a function of wave steepness. Expanding the unknown function in a small perturbation parameter and using a successive expansion in a Taylor series for the water particle path and the period of a particle motion, we obtain the third-order asymptotic expressions for the Lagrangian particle trajectories and the period of particle motion directly in Lagrangian form. In particular, the Lagrangian mean level which differs from that in the Eulerian approach is also found as a part of the solutions. Therefore, the given Eulerian solutions can be transformed into the completely unknown Lagrangian solutions and the reversible process is also identified.

This chapter explores novel ways of improving flexibility, responsiveness, and competitiveness via strategic information technology (IT) alliances among channel members in a supply chain network. To gain competitiveness, firms have to constantly update their operational strategies and information technologies through collaborative efforts of a “network” of supply chain members rather than the efforts of an individual firm. In sum, the foci of this chapter are: (1) an overview of supply chain management (SCM) issues and problems, (2) supply chain coordination and integration, (3) the latest IT applications for improved supply chain performance and coordination, and (4) strategic IT alliances. This chapter concludes with a discussion of business implications and recommendations of future research.

This study reports the transformation between the third-order Eulerian and Lagrangian solutions for the progressive water gravity waves propagating on water of uniform depth. Regarding to the motion of a marked fluid particle, the instantaneous velocity, mass conservation and free surface must be the same for solufions of either Eulerian or Lagrangian method. Using a successive Taylor series expansion to the path and the period of particle motion, the given conventional Eulerian solutions can be transformed into the completely unknown Lagrangian solutions and the reversible process is also identified. In the asymptotic solution, the explicit parametric equation of water particles can be obtained. In particular, the Lagrangian mean level and the Lagrangian wave frequency which differ from those in the Eulerian approach are found as part of the solutions. It shows that the present technique provides a modified method to obtain the third-order Lagrangian solution from the known Eulerian solutions.