From Sweden to Sicily for the Love of Supply Chains

This past Tuesday, we had quite the adventurous travel from Gothenburg, Sweden to Taormina, Sicily. We made it uneventfully via Air Berlin from Landvetter Airport in Gothenburg to Berlin, Germany (can't wait for the new Berlin Airport to be finally finished) and enjoyed the delicious chocolates that we were given upon disembarking (through the back door of the plane, no less).

After a great lunch at the Berlin Airport we saw that our flight to Catania, Sicily was on time so we went to security only to find out that our carryon bags were too heavy so that we had to check them. Upon arriving at the  checkin counter for Air Berlin  we were told our flight was delayed by 8 hours and would leave (if you trust) at 10:30PM! Since there was still about a one hour trip by taxi from Catania to Taormina we knew that this would not work for us and there was too much uncertainty, in any event.

After standuing in line for 40 minutes at the Air Berlin counter to wait for a reassignment we were told we were on our own so off we ran to the Germanwings counter to try and get on a flight at 4:20PM. Great service and not a bad price and after a wait we were comfortably seated and en route to Sicily!

Upon arrival in Catania, we were met by an Italian taxi driver who took us in his black Mercedes to Taormina where the conference, Mathematics in Industry. was taking place. The drive at high speed on the flowerstudded expressway was quite the experience and, when we arrived at the conference hotel, we were told that we were put into another hotel (5 star!) a 10 minute walk away.

The venue in Taormina has been magical but, best of all, was seeing Professor Patrizia Daniele, who is a Supernetwork Center Associate and who has visited me at the Isenberg School and when I was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She invited me to speak at this conference and organized a special session, Recent Advances on Equilibrium Problems with Applications to Networks. Plus, one of my former doctoral students, Professor Fuminori Toyasaki, who is a Professor at York University in Toronto, is also here and he will be presenting a joint paper of ours on electronic recycling, co-authored with Professor Tina Wakolbinger of the Vienna University of Economics and Business (who also was my former doctoral student at the Isenberg School of Management), and her doctoral student, Thomas Nowak. That paper was just published in the International Journal of Production Economics.

Our session takes place later today and I am so exited to be presenting the paper, Supply Chain Network Competition in Time-Sensitive Markets, co-authored with my former doctoral student, Professor Min Yu of the University of Portland, my great colleague at the University of Gothenburg, Professor Jonas Floden, and even my husband, Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney of the University of Hartford!

The photos below were taken at the conference venue and surrounding area. No wonder movie stars will soon be converging here in Taormina where a major movie festival will take place. The beauty of this part of Italy is breathtaking and the people are so friendly and generous.

And I have to mention that the food in Sicily is delicious and so beautifully presented! I can see why those who consume the Mediterranean diet live longer, but, perhaps, it is also the climate and the beauty of where they live.

Blood Supply Chains and Great Journalists

My suitcase is packed and I am pumped for two conferences in Italy and in Greece at which I will be presenting research with collaborators on supply chain networks in time-sensitive markets.

But before I leave for the airport, I wanted to comment on what an amazing week this has been.

Early last week, I had the privilege of being contacted by a journalist,  Paul Sisson, of UT-San Diego.  Sisson focuses on healthcare topics. He was writing an article for his newspaper for the Sunday Business Section on a supply chain we should all very much care about - the blood supply chain. He was wondering, since my group at the Supernetwork Center at the Isenberg School had done quite a lot of research and writing on this topic (and even teaching about it), whether I would be willing to answer some questions.

Although I am now spending a few weeks in Sweden as a Visiting Professor, since effective healthcare supply chains, including the truly unique blood one, are passions of mine (and it was clear that Sisson feels the same way), I had to say, "yes!"

His questions were so interesting, insightful, and thoughtful, I enjoyed the process of addressing them very much.

Paul Sisson's article, "A Vital Supply Chain,"  is online on the newspaper website. 
A pdf version is available here.

Communicating research to a journalist who is very interested in the subject is very gratifying and it also helps one to further flesh out the important aspects of the research findings and their relevance. I very much respect the important work that journalists do in keeping us informed and educated! A hearty thank you! 

Journalists, working with academics, can even help to move research and education forward through appropriate and probing queries!

Although, of course, only some highlights of an interview, even even an extensive one, may actually be published in a newspaper article, the exchange stays with one. This kind of recognition is also further support of the research that we do with collaborators and with our students.

I highlight some fascinating factoids below about blood supply chains.

Think about this - The supply of human blood depends completely on volunteerism since human blood, unlike numerous products, cannot be manufactured. The producers of this critical needs product are humans themselves and they have to be altruistic in their donations, effectively giving a part of themselves to others. The great majority of blood collection facilities in the US are  managed by the Red Cross (about 45%)  or by the network of US Blood Centers (about 50%) and these are nonprofit organizations. Other suppliers of blood are certain hospitals, usually, larger ones.  The collection facilities themselves can be either mobile or fixed. According to the American Red Cross, over 39,000 donations are needed everyday and there have been times when the supply was just 2 days short of running out.

Given that the production and, hence,  supply of blood is based, primarily, to-date,  on volunteers, there is uncertainty on the supply side as well as risk - will donors show up?  Both great and bad weather days may result in insufficient donations. Donors may go to the beach in the case of the former and may be stuck due to a snowstorm in the case of the latter.  There is also uncertainty  on the demand side since although some medical procedures are pre-scheduled and for such procedures demand for blood products can  be more easily forecast, there are also unforeseeable emergencies that do take place (disasters, accidents, etc.).  Hence, balancing supply and demand is a matter of life and death in this supply chain. Of 1,700 hospitals taking part in a survey in 2007, a total of 492 reported cancellations of elective surgeries on one or more days due to blood shortages. Also, there are no economies of scale in "production" in this supply chain since many of the volunteers (can) donate only 1 pint at a time and do so, typically, in the case of repeat donors, only twice a year.

This blood  supply chain is, in effect, a reverse supply chain. Most products - think of cars and high tech products - are assembled by putting distinct parts/components together to make the final product. Whole blood, when extracted, on the other hand, is disassembled into such components as Red Blood Cells (RBCs) and plasma with platelets extracted through a process known as asphoresis. Interestingly, thus, blood supply chains have commonality with reverse supply chains as in the electronic recycling of such products as computers and cell phones (where extraction of certain elements can be a treasure trove). (We have done research on these supply chains as well.)

Blood is highly perishable with the shelf life of RBCs ranging from 35 days - 42 days, that of platelets 5 days, whereas plasma can be frozen for up to 1 year. Therefor, there are immense time pressures on this product;  at the same time, blood must undergo numerous steps of testing, processing, storage, and distribution to the points of demand such as hospitals and other healthcare facilities.


For those of you who are interested in reading more about our research on blood supply chains, which was inspired by one of my former doctoral student's (Amir H. Masoumi's) great interest in the subject, I have highlighted papers with links below.

Supply Chain Network Operations Management of a Blood Banking System with Cost and Risk Minimization, Anna Nagurney, Amir H. Masoumi, and Min Yu, Computational Management Science 9(2): (2012) pp 205-231.

Supply Chain Network Design of a Sustainable Blood Banking System, Anna Nagurney and Amir H. Masoumi, in Sustainable Supply Chains: Models, Methods and Public Policy Implications, T. Boone, V. Jayaraman, and R. Ganeshan, Editors, Springer, London, England (2012) pp 49-72.

Also, our latest book, Networks Against Time: Supply Chains for Perishable Products, co-authored with Professor Min Yu of the University of Portland, Professor Amir H. Masoumi of Manhattan College, and Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney of the University of Hartford, provides a synthesis of some of the other fascinating supply chains, along with blood supply chains,  that we have worked on that deal with perishable and time-sensitive products.

Both Dr. Min Yu and Dr. Amir H. Masoumi received their PhDs from the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst and their concentrations were in Management Science.

Celebrating a Great Operations Researcher and Friend Professor Panos M. Pardalos

Very soon the conference in honor of Distinguished Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering Panos M. Pardalos of the University of Florida, Gainesville, will take place in beautiful Chalkidiki, Greece. We will be recognizing this great operations researcher and scientist, who has been deservedly lauded with numerous awards from being elected INFORMS Fellow, class of 2006, to his receipt of the Euro Gold Medal Award in 2013, to his being appointed the first Paul and Heidi Brown Preeminent Professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering.

Panos' record of accomplishments is breath-taking from his outstanding and voluminous research in optimization and numerous applications from engineering to even medicine. At the same time, he is extremely generous and giving to his numerous doctoral students, collaborators, and colleagues from around the globe. His energy, stamina, knowledge, and vision are legendary.

And he is a very special friend and role model for multiple generations of operations researchers.

When I received an invitation from the organizers of the conference in honor of Professor Pardalos' 60th birthday, Professors Sergiy Butenko and Sakis Migdalas, I had to accept.

The conference in honor of Panos is entitled:  Conference on Optimization Control and Applications in the Information Age will take place June 15-20, 2014.

Speakers will be coming from many different countries, including my former doctoral student at the Isenberg School of Management, Dr. Dmytro Matsypura, who has tenure now at the School of Business at the stunning University of Sydney in Australia!

At the conference we will present Panos with a book, with the cover featured below. More information on the book is available from the Springer website.

 

Another former doctoral student of mine, Dr. Min Yu, of the University of Portland, and I have contributed the paper, A Supply Chain Network Game Theoretic Framework for Time-Based Competition with Transportation Costs and Product Differentiation, to this book, which is edited by  Th. M. Rassias, C. A. Floudas, and S. Butenko, Springer, New York (2014).

I will be presenting the paper, Supply Chain Network Competition in Time-Sensitive Markets, Anna Nagurney, Min Yu, Jonas Floden, and Ladimer S. Nagurney, which builds on the paper in the edited book.

The full presentation can be downloaded from the Virtual Center for Supernetworks website.

Last summer I spoke at a conference on Network Models in Economics and Finance in Athens, Greece, which Panos organized and the photo of us with some researchers is below.

We look forward to celebrating the achievements and the humanity and kindness of Professor Pardalos!

Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts -

You may have read the very provocative article in The Wall Street Journal entitled, Gender Bias Alleged at UCLA's Anderson Business School.  The article included the graphic below which highlights dramatically the paucity of tenured and tenure-track female faculty at business schools.

As the first female Full Professor at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst and the first female holder of an endowed chaired professorship in the UMass system, the statistics and comments in the article really pained me and, yet, I fully understood the situation. Just read the following from the article: Prof. Rossi, who has been at the school since 1997, said she hasn't observed overt discrimination or hostility at Anderson, but said she has witnessed subtle digs and dismissive comments directed at women from colleagues and students. "It's death by a thousand paper cuts," she said.  Professor Aimee Drolet Rossi is a marketing professor and a member of the Gender Equity Task Force, created by Dr. Olian, the first female Dean of UCLA's Anderson School of Management. 

Everyone, males and females alike, needs to be treated professionally, in a civil manner, and have their contributions valued and recognized. 

Our colleges and universities are microcosms of our modern society. Lessons learned in academia carry through in one's life and impact behavior in government, the corporate world, our neighborhoods, and our families.

Academia is a testbed for our social and professional networks and for analyzing the behavior of decision-makers in hierarchies from students to faculty and staff to administrators, from department chairs to the upper echelons of  deans, provosts, chancellors, and presidents. Along the way, civility has been lost and the ivory tower now stands upon a muddy foundation. Positive, inclusive leadership has to come from the top.

There once was a time when collegiality mattered and a colleague's success would be celebrated through public recognition or a kind, personal note (remember those?). I even received, on several occasions, a bouquet of flowers, delivered with chocolate chip cookies for my daughter, sent, compliments of a top administrator.

Those not acknowledged appropriately and feeling excluded – I have listened to many from Assistant Professors to Full Professors  – actually feel pain. I have personally felt victimized - sometimes the "brand" is only what matters rather than individuals and research.

An organization such as a college or university is built on the achievements of all, accumulated over many, many years, as is its reputation and history. Good manners matter and provide the lubricant for the flourishing of work and productivity.  Good manners should be part and parcel of the academic culture. Why is it, then,  so hard for some in academia, which has been referred to as the “loneliest profession,”  to acknowledge with a thank you (even emailing a “Thnx” seems to be challenging for some),  to be consistent in recognizing contributions of individuals, to be inclusive communicators  and conduits for information, and to be respectful of others?


Civil society is built on courtesy, respect, and empathy.

It's time to bring back good manners to academia. Females, and even males, should not be dying by a thousand paper cuts!

Graduation and Prom Season in Sweden

It is fabulous to be back in Sweden as a Visiting Professor of Operations Management at the University of Gothenburg (GU) in Sweden. I have been busy revising research papers with a colleague here, taking part in many fabulous discussions on logistics and transportation, working on new projects, and, since I am living in this city I can't help but also enjoy the numerous celebratory events taking place at this time of the year!

Yes, folks, it is graduation and prom season in Sweden. There are even special cakes for the graduates in the bakeries and bouquets of flowers in the flower shops for them.

The formal graduation for the graduate degree recipients at the School of Business, Economics and Law at GU takes place next week and I have so enjoyed this elegant ceremony for the past two years and was so honored to be selected to deliver the commencement address twice in the past two years

But even before then,  the streets of Gothenburg have been filled with celebrants and and increase in the associated volume of  cheers and joy! Below are photos taken in the past several days in this great city.

Congratulations to all the degree recipients!

Supply Chain Network Competition in Time-Sensitive Markets

The production and delivery of products in a timely manner are essential not only to the satisfaction of consumer demands in many industries but also to a company's reputation.

During last Christmas season, we saw delays of numerous deliveries in the US and even in Sweden Christmas trees that were ordered online, in some cases, arrived past the holiday! Needless to say, there were very many disappointed (and even furious) individuals and families.

Also, there may exist major events or even features such as the top-grossing animated Disney movie, Frozen, that generate intense demand for associated products, including clothing, under immense time pressures. Some of  these are being driven by children's demands for various paraphernalia. As a consequence, and because of the time pressures, now some of the Frozen  clothing products that are produced in China, such as the garments of Princess Anna (I do like that name - thanks, Disney), are being shipped by air rather than by slow boats.

Markets in which consumers are willing to pay a higher price for lower delivery times are knows as  time-sensitive markets. Below are examples of a few products that fit into this important category of consumer goods.

Fresh produce, many medicines and vaccines, human blood, as well as certain fashion goods are all time-sensitive.

One of the major challenges of supply chains that are globally dispersed is the pressures put in the production and transportation of time-sensitive products. Brands and firms that can deliver the goods in good condition and in a timely manner can reap greater profitss.

In our latest research, Supply Chain Network Competition in Time-Sensitive Markets, Anna Nagurney, Min Yu, Jonas Floden, and Ladimer S. Nagurney,  we develop a game theory model for supply chain network competition in time-sensitive markets in which consumers respond to the average delivery time associated with the various firms' products. The firms' behavior is captured, along with the supply chain network topologies, with the governing equilibrium concept being that of Nash equilibrium. We derive the variational inequality formulation of the equilibrium conditions and provide illustrative examples. We also identify special cases for distinct applications. An algorithm is proposed, and the framework further illustrated through a case study in which we explore varying sensitivities to the average time delivery with interesting results.

We will be presenting this paper at the Mathematics for Industry conference in Taormina, Sicily, Italy, next week, upon the invitation of our colleague, and  Center Associate of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, Professor Patrizia Daniele. Our paper will be presented in the session: Recent advances on equilibrium problems with applications to networks. One of my former PhD students, Professor Fuminori Toyasaki of York University in Toronto will also be presenting in this session.

We will also present the paper the week after at the festschrift conference in Greece in honor of our dear friend, Professor Panos M. Pardalos.

The full presentation can be downloaded from the Virtual Center for Supernetworks website here.

How appropriate that this collaboration across continents is now being disseminated at various venues.

Majesty of Swedish Train Stations and Trains

Every year I offer a course at the Isenberg School of Management on Transportation & Logistics, which I very much enjoy teaching.

During my travels and time abroad I am always collecting new materials and also visuals for my course.

Presently, I am back in Europe, specifically, at the School of Business, Economics and Law, at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden,  where I hold a Visiting Professorship of Operations Management. As part of this faculty appointment I spend several weeks a year in the beautiful city of Gothenburg, which is the second largest city in Sweden, after Stockholm.

On this stunning Sunday morning in Gothenburg, I made my way to the Central Station and was delighted to see so many trains at the station, even double decker ones. I could not resist snapping the photos below and sharing them with my readers.

When I ask my students back in Massachusetts what is their favorite mode of transportation, I always get a response of  "trains," from several of them. I love riding the rails in Europe and wish that there were more such options in the US!

The below photo was taken a few days ago, when one of my close friends, Professor Kai May Lau, of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, came to Gothenburg and spoke at Chalmers University. She also marveled at the Gothenburg Central Station.