Supply chains are the lifeblood of any business, bridging the distance between producer and customer, supply and demand. However, for a long time leaders have considered supply chain management to be a support, cost-added activity, something best kept out of sight and out of mind. Instead, this guide's purpose is to convince business leaders that supply chain management can be used as a business leverage for value creation and competitive advantage. Now more than ever, agile and resilient supply chains are vital in coping with uncertain markets and volatile world events, driving sustainable development, boosting current business models, and even simulating the creation of new ones. This book sets out the terms and paradigms necessary for an understanding of the supply chain, illuminates the types of value supply chain management can provide to businesses, and covers the solutions that business leaders can implement to reap the benefits of a value-creation supply chain approach. Next Generation Supply Chains breaks down this complex, nuanced field with helpful explanations, detailed diagrams and testimonies from leading businesses, laying out why an understanding of supply chain management is integral to any business leader. Written by Michel Fender, an expert with over thirty years' industry experience in advisory, training, technical and management capacities, this is an essential guide to the subject.

In a decentralized supply chain, most of the supply chain agents may not share information due to confidentiality policies, quality of information, or different system incompatibilities. Every actor holds its own set of information and attempts to maximize its objective (minimizing costs/minimizing inventory holdings) based on the available settings. Therefore, the agents control their own activities with the objective of improving their own competitiveness, which leads them to make decisions that maximize their local performance by ignoring the other agents or even the final consumer. These decisions are myopic because they do not consider the performance of all the partners to satisfy the consumer. Demand Forecasting and Order Planning in Supply Chains and Humanitarian Logistics is a collection of innovative research that focuses on demand anticipation, forecasting, and order planning as well as humanitarian logistics to propose original solutions for existing problems. While highlighting topics including artificial intelligence, information sharing, and operations management, this book is ideally designed for supply chain managers, logistics personnel, business executives, management experts, operation industry professionals, academicians, researchers, and students who want to improve their understanding of supply chain coordination in order to be competitive in the new era of globalization.