The Fashion Supply Chain Management Book is Now Available

Today I received my copy of the book, Fashion Supply Chain Management: Industry and Business Analysis, a photo of which is above. The book was edited by Professor Tsan-Ming Choi and it is a stunning volume with sections on Mathematical Modeling Research, Quantitative Empirical Research, and Exploratory Study and Case Research.

The publisher is IGI Global in Hershey, PA.

The full list of chapters and their authors can be found here.

Our contribution to this book is the first chapter,

Fashion Supply Chain Management through Cost and Time Minimization from a Network Perspective (pages 1-20),

Anna Nagurney (University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA), and Min Yu (University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA)

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New York City and Fashion Supply Chain Management

I recently spent a few days in New York City and stayed at our favorite hotel on the Upper West Side, The Excelsior, which is across from the Museum of Natural History. As appropriate to one of the themes of the 2011 World Science Festival, which took place in NYC, June 1-5, I basked in both Art and Science.

I had a chance to go to the Guggenheim, which will soon be celebrating its 40th anniversary, to see the Frick Collection, and the Cooper and Hewitt Smithsonian Museum of Design, which had a breath-taking exhibit on over one hundred years of Van Cleef and Arpels jewelry. Also, my family and I got to see several of our relatives and my daughter got together with a friend from her prep school (while strolling in Central Park they were recognized by another friend of theirs who was in town from Connecticut to see The Museum of Natural History). Of course, we also headed over to Broadway and Times Square to view the pedestrian plaza where I had been filmed back in freezing March for the PBS production American Revealed for a segment on Transportation and the Braess paradox and even Basketball!

NYC never fails to captivate and we walked for miles and enjoyed not only Central Park but also the hustle and bustle of NYC and the amazing sights, sounds, energy, people, fashion (high as well as fast) and live theater.

Speaking of fashion, I am delighted that the preface to the Fashion Supply Chain Management: Industry and Business Analysis book is now online. This book, in which we have the leading chapter, Fashion Supply Chain Management Through Cost and Time Minimization from a Network Perspective, is edited by Dr. T.-M. Choi, and will be released next month.

Above I have posted some photos that were taken this past week in NYC, which depict scenes that show the beauty and elegance of this great city. I must also commend the taxi drivers, whose navigation and driving skills are terrific (at least in mid-Manhattan) and we made it to Penn Station just in time to catch the Metro North train.

Deriving Guilty Pleasure from Doing Research on Fashion Supply Chain Management

Research is hard but research can also be a lot of fun!

When opportunities come your way, you should take advantage of them because they may not only open doors but also provide new directions for intellectual explorations and collaborations.

Last Friday, I wrote about the wonderful time we had with our inaugural "Meet the Executive" event, which featured our alum, Mr. Marc Schneider of PVH. We were honored and, frankly, thrilled, that Mr. Schneider, who is an executive in the fashion industry, and is based in NYC, was speaking to us during Fashion Week. His talk and visit were truly inspirational and with the extraordinary positive feedback that we have received, we will do another such event this semester. Interestingly, and this I did not expect, some of the most engaging conversations at the lunch that followed took place among the men (and women) discussing fashion at our University Club, which is in a building that dates to 1728!

I noted at the lunch that one of my doctoral students, Min Yu, who was also present, and I have been conducting research on fashion supply chain management for the past year and I am deriving guilty pleasure from working in this area. Also, I could not resist wearing a pink Longchamps silk scarf last Friday that was given to me as a gift for speaking at the Management Science Forum at Fudan University in Shanghai, back in 2006!

Not much research has been done in fashion supply chain management. Firstly, fashion is a creative industry and there are presently unique challenges with fast fashion making a big impact, plus issues regarding the increasing costs of raw materials, including cotton, leather, and polyester, and the big role of outsourcing in this industry. In addition, this industry is seeking to minimize waste and its pollution imprint (or at least some players are). At the same time, fashion is an industry in which brands matter and there is competition among brands.

Min and I became intrigued both by the time-sensitivity of various fashion products as well as by the sustainability issues. Our latest collaboration resulted in the paper, "Fashion Supply Chain Management Under Oligopolistic Competition and Brand Differentiation," which has now been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Production Economics, Special Issue on Green Manufacturing and Distribution in the Fashion and Apparel Industries.

Our paper that focuses on fast fashion, entitled: "Fashion Supply Chain Management Through Cost and Time Minimization from a Network Perspective," will be the lead chapter in the book, Fashion Supply Chain Management: Industry and Business Analysis, which is edited by Dr. T.-M. Choi, and is scheduled to be out in April 2011.

The seeds for this research must have been planted early, since even one of my former undergrads, Christina Calvaneso, who worked as a Center Associate of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks that I direct, and went on to work for GE and Deloitte, is now working for Rent the Runway in NYC in a senior finance capacity! Moreover, one of the undergrads at our lunch last Friday, who had interned at Goldman Sachs last summer, and is from Hong Kong, has accepted an offer from Deloitte and hopes to work in consulting for the fashion industry.

Time-Sensitive Products, Cost, and Cargo Security

Freight as the Weakest Link in the Chain was the title of my blogpost the other day and I see that today's New York Times has an article: In Air Cargo Business, It's Speed vs. Screening, Creating a Wink Link in Security.

The article focuses on time-sensitive products, a topic that we have conducted a lot of research on from fashion supply chains (not a life or death application but clothing is a basic right) to blood supply chains (another fascinating topic of research that we are completing a study on).

The Times article has several quotes from Professor Yossi Sheffi, a colleague of mine in transportation and logistics at MIT, whose center I visited when I held an NSF Faculty Award for Women.

Sheffi says: “You cannot stop the flow of time-sensitive air freight,” and “It is simply not realistic.” Professor Sheffi is the author of the book, Urban Transportation Networks, which is one of the books that I recommend to my students in the Transportation & Logistics course that I am instructing with help from my two wonderful Teaching Assistants, Nathan Kollett and Min Yu, who are doctoral students in Management Science at the Isenberg School of Management. Sheffi is also the author of The Resilient Enterprise.

Freight is a critical link in our global supply chains that produce and distribute products around the world. Hence, their security and viability are essential to our connected enterprises.

The air cargo system is built into the way many companies do business. However, the way that cargo is packed also makes it difficult to inspect, from special packaging, such as shrink-wrapping, which may provide exemption from inspections.

We are in an era of Fragile Networks in which multicriteria decision-making needs to be the norm for decision-making coupled with the identification of vulnerabilities and potential synergies in business.

Sustainable Fashion Supply Chain Management Under Competition and Brand Differentiation

In an earlier blogpost, I wrote about our recent work in fashion supply chain management and in sustainable supply chain network design.

I am pleased to announce that one of my doctoral students, Min Yu, and I have completed a study of sustainable fashion supply chain management. In the study, which is documented in our research paper, we developed a modeling framework that captures competition in fashion supply chains in the case of differentiated products with the inclusion of environmental concerns. The model assumes that each fashion firm's product is distinct by brand.

Each fashion firm seeks to maximize its profits and to minimize the emissions that it generates throughout its supply chain as it engages in its activities of manufacturing, storage, and distribution, with a weight associated with the latter criterion. The model allows for alternative modes of transportation from manufacturing sites to distribution centers and from distribution centers to the demand markets, since different modes of transportation are known to emit different amounts of emissions.

The competitive supply chain network model advances the state-of-the-art of fashion supply chain modeling in several ways:

1. it captures competition through brand differentiation, which is an important feature of the fashion industry;

2. it allows for each firm to individually weight its concern for the environment in its decision-making, and

3. through a general network framework, alternatives such as multiple modes of transportation can be investigated.

In our paper, we also presented a case study, in which, through a series of numerical examples, we demonstrated the effects of changes on the demand price functions; the total cost and total emission functions, as well as the weights associated with the environmental criterion on the equilibrium product demands, the product prices, profits, and utilities. We noted that the environmental weights could also be interpreted as taxes and, thus, in exploring different values an authority such as the government could assess a priori the effects on the firms' emissions and profits.

The case study also demonstrated that consumers can have a major impact, through their environmental consciousness, on the level of profits of firms in their favoring of firms that adopt environmental pollution-abatement technologies for their supply chain activities.

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.