Purchasing

Summary

Purchasing is the process a business or organization uses to acquire goods or services to accomplish its goals. Although there are several organizations that attempt to set standards in the purchasing process, processes can vary greatly between organizations. Purchasing is part of the wider procurement process, which typically also includes expediting, supplier quality, transportation, and logistics. Details Purchasing managers/directors, procurement managers/directors, or staff based in an organization's Purchasing Office, guide the organization's acquisition procedures and standards and operational purchasing activities. Most organizations use a three-way check as the foundation of their purchasing programs. This involves three departments in the organization completing separate parts of the acquisition process. The three departments do not all report to the same senior manager, to prevent unethical practices and lend credibility to the process. These departments can be

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing

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Product assortment and space allocation strategies to attract loyal and non-loyal customers

Argyro Katsifou, Ralf Seifert, Anna Timonina-Farkas

Assortment planning deserves much attention from practitioners and academics due to its direct impact on retailers' commercial success. In this paper we focus on the increasingly popular retail practice to use combined product assortments with both "standard" and more fashionable and short-lived "variable" products for building up store traffic of "loyal" and "non-loyal" heterogeneous customers and enlarging the sales due to the potential cross-selling effect. Addressing the assortment planning as a bilevel optimization problem, we focus on decision-dependent uncertainties: the retailer's binary decision about product inclusion influences the distribution of the product's demand. Furthermore, our model accounts for customers' optimal purchase quantities, which depend on budget constraints limiting the basket that a customer is able to purchase. We propose iterative heuristics using optimal quantization of demand and customers budget distributions to define the total assortment and the inventory level per product. These heuristics provide lower bounds on the optimal value. We conduct a comparison to other existing lower bounds and we formulate upper bounds via linear (LP) and semidefinite (SDP) relaxations for the performance evaluation of the heuristics and for an efficient numerical solution in high-dimensional cases. For managerial insights, we compare the proposed approach with three assortment planning strategies: (1) the retailer does not carry variable products; (2) the retailer ignores the cross-selling effect; and (3) the maximum space allocated to each product is fixed. Our results suggest that variable assortment boosts the retailers profits if the cross-selling effect is not neglected in the decision about products quantities. (C) 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

2020

A pilot study on eliciting human operations decision in purchasing and measuring their impact on supply chain efficiency

Yvonne Badulescu, Rémy Glardon, Souleïman Naciri, Min-Jung Yoo

This paper presents a methodology for eliciting the behavioural model of purchasers' decision-making in a supply chain environment. The objective of the work is to explicitly describe the relationship between a human user's behaviour and the resulting performance in inventory level and service satisfaction. The key research findings include: (i) How to identify a categorised pattern of a human decision model, particularly concerning purchasing operations; and (ii) Which metrics would be relevant in the objective of carrying out a quantitative analysis on decision behaviour. The order placement behaviour is studied as one of daily operational decisions. The work demonstrates how to analyse a potential relationship between each category of behaviour and selected measures of supply chain performance, i.e., average inventory level and delivery satisfaction. We developed a specialised tool for supply chain simulation aimed at collecting data such as information consultations and decision-making actions of purchasing operations. The methodology is composed of sub-processes, such as data log file generation, data parsing and information generation, behaviour profile identification through clustering, and the analysis of supply performance regarding each category of decision-making behaviour. Through experimentation with industrial purchasing agents, we validated the effectiveness of the approach and demonstrated how to achieve a quantitative analysis of decision making behaviour and its impact on supply performance. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2017

Modeling purchases of new cars: an analysis of the 2014 French market

Michel Bierlaire, Matthieu Marie Cochon de Lapparent, Anna Fernández Antolín

2018