Fashion Supply Chain Management, School Ties, and the Preppy Handbook

Our paper, "Fashion Supply Chain Management Through Cost and Time Minimization from a Network Perspective," is now available online on the Supernetworks Center website.

This invited paper was co-authored with one of my doctoral students, Min Yu, for an edited volume on fashion supply chains.

As the abstract states: In this paper, we consider fashion supply chain management through cost and time minimization, from a network perspective and in the case of multiple fashion products. We develop a multicriteria decision-making optimization model subject to multimarket demand satisfaction, and provide its equivalent variational inequality formulation. The model allows for the determination of the optimal multiproduct fashion flows associated with the supply chain network activities, in the form of: manufacturing, storage, and distribution, and identifies the minimal total operational cost and total time consumption.The model allows the decision-maker to weight the total time minimization objective of the supply chain network for the time-sensitive fashion products, as appropriate. Furthermore, we discuss potential applications to fashion supply chain management through a series of numerical examples.

We very much enjoyed conducting the research on which this paper is based.

Working with students on research can take one on intellectual journeys that yield discoveries in terms of new analytical methodologies as well as conceptual frameworks and exciting new applications, that one may not have pursued individually. Collaborations are key to successful research and, when they work well, yield intellectual, professional, and personal rewards.

Building networks through collaborations, beginning at one's educational institutions, may yield life-long partnerships. This is something that I aim to support as the Director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks. This is an exciting time of the year when we begin to welcome new students and associates. Our newest Student Center Associate is Mr. Nathan Kollett, who has matriculated into our doctoral program in Management Science at the Isenberg School and who for the past two years has worked at State Street Corporation in Boston.

Speaking of "school ties," the latest issue of Vanity Fair has several articles featuring my fellow alums from Brown University with one article on Steve Rattner, Obama's "Car Czar," who was the former editor of the Brown Daily Herald, and another on the revised "Preppy Handbook," True Prep, by Lisa Birnbach, another Brown alum, with Chip Kidd. True Prep will be released on September 7 and I am sure that it will be very entertaining reading.

I am a product of an inner city high school, Yonkers High School, which had outstanding teachers and I received four degrees from Brown University, including my PhD. The excerpt from True Prep states that a preppy always has a navy blazer, a fashion piece that is part of my frequent flier uniform, so I guess that aspect of my academic ambience ultimately did rub off on me or perhaps I just subconsciously adopted the uniform of the male execs in business class.

Learning from Students, Getting a PhD, and Travel to China

Next Thursday and Friday will be very special. On Thursday, March 26, 2009, Patrick Qiang is scheduled to defend his doctoral dissertation, "Network Efficiency / Performance Measurement with Vulnerability and Robustness Analysis with Application to Critical Infrastructure." I have had the privilege of chairing Patrick's doctoral dissertation committee at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst. Patrick will be my 14th doctoral student to graduate. Of special note -- a member of his dissertation committee is Professor June Dong who received her PhD in 1994 from UMass Amherst and is now a Full Professor at the School of Business at SUNY Oswego. Professor Dong will be speaking in the UMass Amherst Spring 2009 INFORMS Speaker Series the following day. Her talk will be on supply chain disruptions. Professor Dong was also a PhD student of mine and her journey from China has been amazing. In a sense, she took me back to her home, when I visited Shanghai in August 2006. I had the very special honor of being a plenary speaker at the Fudan Management Science Forum and was also on the Fudan Management Science Prize Committee. My Chinese hosts could not have been more gracious. What made the trip even more special was being with Professor June Dong who showed me where she had gone to school in Shanghai, where her family had lived, and provided me with a wonderful education on her city.

To obtain a PhD is a lengthy and difficult process. To have had students such as the ones that I have had the privilege to teach and to work with, makes the years of effort most worthwhile! What could make a professor prouder than having students succeed and "fly on their won wings!"