Which Suppliers Really Matter to Your Supply Chain Performance?

We have certainly experienced a long list of supplier failures, whether from natural disasters, quality shortcomings (with the automotive industry being a notable example, as well as compounding pharmacies),  or even due to the Ebola healthcare and humanitarian logistics crisis, with great demand for the timely delivery of critical needs supplies for both healthcare providers and patients being unmet, not to mention the healthcare providers themselves in the form of human supply chains.

With numerous supply chains, from high tech products, to pharmaceuticals, to even food, being increasingly complex in terms of both the network topology, the number of decision-makers,  as well as the distances involved, it is high time for performance metrics and ranking tools to enable the identification of which suppliers as well as the components that they provide matter not only to the full supply chain but also to your individual firm.

First, one has to realize that this is the Era of the Supply Chain Network Economy and tools that just handle one supplier - one manufacturer are completely out-of-date. One has to be able to capture the interrelationships among suppliers, who are profit-maximizing, as well as the firms that they supply, who in turn, compete with other firms.

In our most recent paper: Supply Chain Performance Assessment and Supplier and Component Importance Identification in a General Competitive Multitiered Supply Chain Network Model, Dong Li and Anna Nagurney, that I co-authored with one of my doctoral students, who has done great work on supply chain network competition and quality, we provide a performance assessment metric for the full supply chain, and for that of an individual firm.  The metric quantifies the efficiency of the supply chain or firm, respectively, and also allows for the identification and ranking of the importance of suppliers as well as the components of suppliers with respect to the full supply chain or individual firm. The firms are differentiated by brands and our general multitiered competitive supply chain network equilibrium model with suppliers and firms includes capacities and constraints to capture the production activities. Firms may have a certain amount of capability to produce components in-house, depending on their capacities.

The supply chain network performance measure is inspired by our work on network performance assessment in a variety of network systems ranging from transportation to the Internet (see Nagurney and Qiang (2009) and the references therein) as well as in supply chains (cf. Qiang, Nagurney, and Dong (2009), and Qiang and Nagurney (2012)) but with the addition of the supplier tier, which is the focus in our paper.

Suppliers in supply chains are even vital to cybersecurity and the above graphic taken from our paper was part of the presentation that I gave last month at the Sloan School at MIT as part of the Advanced Cyber Security Workshop that I co-organized with several Isenberg School colleagues and a College of Engineering one.

Student and Faculty Accolades in the Beautiful Isenberg School of Management Atrium

In just over a week, we will be memoralizing the late Mr. Gene Isenberg, after whom our School of Management at UMass Amherst is named, and recognizing also his wife, Ronnie, and their family. 

We received the nice invitation via email recently.

Chancellor Kumble R. Subbaswamy and Dean Mark A. Fuller cordially invite you to

 A Tribute to Gene M. Isenberg in recognition of the life of Mr. Isenberg and the numerous contributions he, Ronnie and their family have made to the Isenberg School and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Monday, October 20, 2014 at 2:30pm

Flavin Auditorium, Isenberg School of Management
Reception to follow in the Isenberg Atrium

Our lovely school atrium has been undergoing some spiffing up for the event and the display cases have been updated. 

I was thrilled to see student awards received by student chapters in one of the display cases, including two of the most recent Magna Cum Laude Award plaques that the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter received in the past two years. Just last Friday, we celebrated the chapter's 10th anniversary. 

Also, on the other side of the entranceway, it was very special to see our latest new endowed professor, Dr. Hossein Kazemi of Finance recognized, another colleague in Management, Dr. Chuck Manz, the Nirenberg Professor, as well as Dr. Bing Liang of Finance, and even yours truly, with my INFORMS Fellow plaque, awarded in 2013, and the Walter Isard Award, given in 2012.

The school is getting ready for the tribute - the Isenbergs through their philanthropy have made a huge impact on our students, faculty, staff, and infrastructure and we thank them profusely!

Recognizing Female Talent in Tech, Welcome to the 21st Century, Mr. Nadella of Microsoft

The news came to me this morning from my husband who had received it in his ASEE (American Society for Engineering Education) daily email newsletter and he was shocked.

Yesterday, at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference, Satya Nadella, the Chief Executive of Microsoft,  suggested that women who do not ask for more money from their employers would be rewarded in the long run when their good work was recognized.

The New York Times had a great article on this "misspeaking"  complete with a video in which Dr. Maria Klawe, the President of Harvey Mudd College, and former Dean of Engineering at Princeton, completely disagrees with him. I have written about Dr. Klawe, since I am a big fan of hers and she has been very innovative in computing education and in breaking down barriers.

The Twittersphere lit up with Nadella's telling women not to ask for a raise but to wait for good karma - I kid you not! 

We are, last time that I checked, living in the 21st century, in which Lean In has become the mantra, Larry Summers is no longer President of Harvard University, but Drew Gilpin Faust is and she was the Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study when I was a Science Fellow there 2005-2006.  Coincidentally, in the same Times article, Claudia Goldin, who was also a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard my year,  is quoted.

Female talent in tech needs to be recognized and rewarded and having the right salary is one clear way in which to do this. Dr. Klawe regrets not speaking up when negotiating for her offer from Princeton and even more recently from Harvey Mudd College.

Another way to recognize females is through professional society awards.

For example, WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences),  a forum of INFORMS, started the WORMS Award 9 years ago.  The Award for the Advancement of Women in OR/MS celebrates and recognizes a person who has contributed significantly to the advancement and recognition of women in the field of Operations Research and the Management Sciences (OR/MS).

Several of the WORMS Award recipients have also been  elected  INFORMS Fellows: Cynthia Barnhart of MIT, Brenda Dietrich of IBM, Kathy Stecke of UT Dallas, yours truly in 2013, and, this year, we have two out of the twelve 2014 INFORMS Fellows being female and also previous WORMS Award winners: Dr. Candi Yano of UC Berkeley and Dr. Radhika Kulkarni of SAS. WORMS has had outstanding officers, including Laura McLay, now at the University of Wisconsin Madison, who served as President, and has done great work in advocating for female tech professionals - thanks!

Perhaps Nadella should come to the INFORMS Conference in San Francisco and meet some truly successful, wonderful female and male pioneers in tech.

Nadella might learn something from Ed Lazowska, who is a Brown University alum, as am I. In an article in USA Today it was stated:  Hiring women and minorities isn't about window dressing. It actually makes it a better and more profitable company, says Ed Lazowska, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington-Seattle. "Engineering (particularly of software) is a hugely creative endeavor. Greater diversity — more points of view — yields a better result," he said.

Indeed, and they should be fairly compensated!

The Great Supernetwork Team at the Great Isenberg School of Management

The latest edition of The Supernetwork Sentinel, the newsletter of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, that I founded in the Fall of 2001 at the Isenberg School, is now available online for download.

It amazes me how much the supernetwork team manages to accomplish through collaboration, support of one another,  working together, and having a great time researching problems wherever supernetworks or networks of networks appear. In the Fall 2014 newsletter, we highlight the recent workshop on cybersecurity risk and enterprises, that we co-organized and that took place at MIT, international conferences that Center Associates spoke at, and recent accolades and awards received. Also, since students are our are future, we noted even the 10th anniversary celebration of the award-winning UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, which took place last Friday at the Isenberg School - complete with a slide show of photos over a decade and  video of testimonials, which included several from the Supernetwork Team - Professor Tina Wakolbinger, Professor Jose Cruz, Professor Amir H. Masoumi, and Professor Leo "Zugang" Liu, who have been great supporters and almost all of them also Chapter Officers plus Isenberg PhD graduates in Management Science!

For all editions of this newsletter over the past decade, please visit our newsletter page.

To do great research, these days, increasingly, it takes a great team, working together, whether it is on problems of humanitarian logistics, environmental issues and supply chains, transportation congestion and policies, quality management and information asymmetry, or even the Future Internet Architecture! With methodological tools of network theory, game theory, projected dynamical systems and variational inequalities, we capture the behavior of interacting agents to gain insights both theoretically and computationally. The collaborations take place across a room, or across oceans. The friendships made support the hard work and make it enjoyable and very rewarding.

And when we get together, whether at conferences, workshops, or just visiting one another, the strong bonds and trust lead to new research directions, and memorable experiences that we treasure.

Photos of the 10th Anniversary Celebration of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter at the Isenberg School

Today was truly a special day!

We marked the 10th anniversary of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter with a party at the Isenberg School of Management.

How do you celebrate 10 years - you do it in great style and I congratulate all the student chapter officers and members for pulling together a party with exceptional cuisines, video testimonials from previous officers and a friend: Professor Amir H. Masoumi of Manhattan College, Professor Tina Wakolbinger of the Vienna University of Economics and Business, who was the Chapter's first President back in 20014, Professor Christian Wernz of Virginia Tech, who was the chapter first President from outside the Isenberg School (from the College of Engineering), Professor Zugang "Leo" Liu of Penn State University Hazleton, and Professor Jose M. Cruz of the University of Connecticut! Shivani Shukla, last year's Chapter President, gathered all the video testimonials and made a wonderful video of all of them - thank you!

And Professor Masoumi surprised us by also showing up with his family!

The testimonials were greatly appreciated!

Our new webmaster and new doctoral student in Management Science, Ekin Koker, put together about 800 photos of chapter activities in a beautiful slide show video, which brought back so many wonderful memories!

The officers even presented me with a gift and a lovely thank you card. It's been a joy serving as the Faculty Advisor of this student chapter and it is amazing the community that we have built and the friendships made over the years.

Thanks to the officers and students for putting together such a memorable, wonderful event today. Thanks also to all the faculty and staff that support this chapter. Your support means a tremendous amount to the students (and to me)!

Below I include some photos from today's celebration for your enjoyment and those who could not be with us in person.

Economist Thomas Piketty, Best-Selling Author of Capital in the 21st Century, Speaks at UMass Amherst

Yesterday, Professor Thomas Piketty, the author of the controversial best-seller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century,  spoke at UMass Amherst to an audience of thousands at the Student Union Ballroom.

He had flown in from Paris to Boston Logan, and had been driven to Amherst by the Chair of the Economics Department, Professor Michael Ash, who introduced him. Our new Provost, Katherine Newman, gave some welcoming remarks, as did Ash.

Piketty had been invited to deliver the Gamble Lecture. According to the announcement: His best-selling book emphasizes the themes of his work on wealth concentrations and distribution over the past 250 years. The book argues that the rate of capital return in developed countries is persistently greater than the rate of economic growth, and that this will cause wealth inequality to increase in the future. To address this problem, he proposes redistribution through a global tax on wealth.

Piketty spoke to an audience of students, faculty, staff, members of the community, and I even saw one of my Operations Management alums there, who drove up from the Hartford area. It was nice to see several of my colleagues from the Isenberg School of management there.

I appreciated his sense of humor - Piketty said that he was speaking French and, indeed, his English sounded French. He is an empirical economist and noted that he is better at analyzing the past than the future. He considers his book, which was published by Harvard University Press,  to be a "historical narrative" and a "collective data collection" project that is continuing and to which data from more countries is being added. He emphasized that the data and graphs are posted online for anyone to access. He obtains his income data from income tax data. One of his major queries was to determine as to why so much wealth is now concentrated at the top.

The Economist provided a summary of the 700 page book in four paragraphs. The book was published in French one year ago and in English last March and has taken the world by storm. It was terrific to be able to see him at UMass Amherst and, as the Provost noted,  our Economics Department is a heterodox one so a great host for Piketty. Piketty stated that he believes in Economics for Society.

I hope that you enjoy the photos below that I took at Piketty's presentation.

I also found online a presentation that he gave last March, which seems as though it is essentially the same as the one he gave yesterday, which can be accessed here.

This has been quite the intellectual week at UMass Amherst, with the Nobel laureate, Dr. Sheldon Glashow, speaking the day before!   One of the best aspects of being in academia is the knowledge exchange through wonderful speakers!

The Serendipity of Science and Why Dreamers are Important - Nobel Laureate Sheldon Glashow at UMass Amherst

Yesterday, we had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Sheldon Glashow, a Nobel laureate in physics speak on "A Parable of the Pure and the Practical," at UMass Amherst.

When I saw the announcement for his talk, which was quite provocative and which is reposted below, I knew that the talk would be great:

Politicians and opinion makers argue stridently that governments and universities should invest only in such areas of research that are likely to result in immediate and specific benefits, through wealth enhancement or job creation. They find undirected curiosity‐driven research in basic science to be useless and unaffordable luxuries that consume resources rather than promoting economic growth and human welfare. 

This talk will show how wrong they are.

Dr. Glashow was inspiring, entertaining, and very energetic and he spoke to a standing room only crowd. He mentioned that this was only the second time he was giving this lecture - the first being in China.

He quoted from Louis Pasteur: "Chance favors the prepared mind," and demonstrated the role that serendipity plays in scientific discoveries. Researchers are trying to do something but find something else from saccharine to velcro, to teflon, to even Viagra (lots of chuckles from the audience).

He emphasized that dreamers are important and that many Nobel prize discoveries where, at first, useless.  He showed through numerous examples - I took photos of some of his slides, which I have posted below, because I could not write fast enough in my notes - that curiosity-driven searches are as effective as directed ones. He also noted technology transfers and that these may take years but without the discovery of DNA structure we would not have gene therapies, without general relativity we would not have GPS systems, and noted that radioisotopes saved his life. This reminded me of the medical nuclear supply chain work that we have published several papers on.

One has to "keep one's eyes wide open" for those accidental discoveries. Think of Kevlar, for example.

I also VERY MUCH appreciated his emphasis of the importance of international collaborations because that is fundamental to our work at the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at the Isenberg School at UMass! He also related his fond memories of his high school in NYC, the Bronx High School of Science, which has produced more Nobel laureates than any high school on the planet - 7 in physics and 1 in chemistry (he did share a lot of jokes about chemists).

You can click on the photos below to enlarge them.

Remember the importance of the scientific method and the prepared mind!

Dr. Glashow also mentioned that his sister-in-law was Lynn Margulis, a former UMass faculty member, who passed away not long ago. I thanked him for his brilliant lecture afterwards and we reminisced about NYC. You could tell that his sense of wonder about the universe has never left him, which is truly special!

And, speaking of those great old school ties, Dr. Glashow was introduced by his former classmate at the Bronx High School of Science, Professor Morton Sternheim, who, along with his wife, has endowed this lecture series.