To improve demand chain performance, is it better for parties in a supply chain to focus first on lead time reduction, or instead concentrate on improving the transfer of demand information upstream in the chain? Even though the theory of supply and demand chain management suggests that lead time reduction is an antecedent to the use of market mediation (i.e., adjusting production to fit actual customer demand as it materializes) [Harvard Business Rev. 75 (2) (1997) 105] to reduce transaction uncertainty in the chain, which can be conceptualized as the primary goal of supply chain management [J. Operat. Manage. 11 (3) (1993) 289], demand chain parties often are observed in practice to begin with information transfer improvement, ignoring the problem of long lead times. In this paper, we propose a framework for prioritizing lead time reduction in a demand chain improvement project, using a typology of demand chains to identify and recommend trajectories to achieve desirable levels of market mediation performance.

3Consider a set o f task pairs coupled in time: a first (initial) and second (completion) tasks of known durations with a specified time between them. If the operator or machine performing these tasks is able to process only one a t a time. scheduling is necessary to insure that no overlap occurs. This problem has a particular application to production scheduling. transportation, and radar operations (send-receive pulses are ideal examples of time-linked tasks requiring scheduling). This article discusses several candidate techniques for schedule determination, and these are evaluated in a specific radar scheduling application.

This paper considers the problem of selling an asset on the open market. The seller receives a random sequence of price offers, which may arrive either periodically or randomly over time. After each offer is received, the seller must decide whether or not to sell, weighing the possibility of obtaining a better offer against the cost of waiting. A number of authors have established the properties of optimal selling policies when the distribution of offers is known and offers are received periodically. This paper investigates the conditions under which these same properties hold for an unknown offer distribution which is updated as successive offers are received.selling strategy, Bayesian updating, stopping rules, adaptive search

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The characteristics of the technology and markets within an industry will affect the range of logistics systems observed in that industry. In some industries the range is wide, while in others all firms make the same logistics choices. This paper explores these differences. We propose the concept of an efficient frontier of cost-service choices and show how firms align themselves along the frontier.