Purpose
– In manufacturing industries, the levels of inventories at all stages (i.e. raw material, work-in-process and finished goods inventories) indicate the firm's competitive positioning, strategies, internal processes and relationships with suppliers and downstream customers. The authors identify patterns of manufacturing industries based on levels of raw material and finished goods inventories to classify inbound and outbound supply chain strategies.
Design/methodology/approach
– The authors review literature on supply chain inventory strategy and perform cluster analysis to analyze patterns of manufacturing industries based on manufacturing industry data collected from US Census of Bureau. Following Porter's Five Forces Model, the authors perform in-depth case studies of four representative industries to analyze factors driving supply chain strategies, including industry intensity of rivalry, threat of new entrants, threat of substitutes, bargaining power of suppliers, and bargaining power of buyers.
Findings
– This study identifies three streams of research on supply chain strategy: Fisher's model and its variations, lean and agile paradigms, and push/pull systems. It finds that whether an industry shows low or high raw materials or finished goods inventories depending on its products, processes, and the dynamics of all forces described in the Five Forces Model.
Research limitations/implications
– This study is not able to include supplier selection, production strategies, warehousing and distribution, and even product design into the analysis of supply chain strategy due to data limitation. This study classifies industries based on average inventory levels of raw materials and finished goods, while inventory levels and supply chain strategies for specific firms may vary significantly within each industry.
Originality/value
– This study contributes to the supply chain management literature by providing a parsimonious framework of mapping inbound and outbound supply chain inventory strategies, and the results based on the analyses of all US manufacturing industries provide a baseline picture for supply chain management professionals with manufacturing firms.
In recent times, managerial applications of neural networks, especially in the area of financial services, has received considerable attention. In this paper, neural network models are developed for a new application: the pricing of Initial Public Offerings (IPOs). Previous empirical studies provide consistent evidence of considerable inefficiency in the pricing of new issues. Neural network models using publicly available financial data as inputs are developed to price IPOs. The pricing performance and the economic benefits of the neural network models are evaluated. Significant economic gains are documented with neural networks. Several tests to establish generalizability and robustness of the results are conducted.Sdject Areas: Initial Public Offerings, Neural Networks, and Statistical Models.
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