Efficient purchaser incentive when dealing with suppliers implementing continuous improvement plans

Laoucine Kerbache and Christian van Delft
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Laoucine Kerbache: GREGH - Groupement de Recherche et d'Etudes en Gestion à HEC - HEC Paris - Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Christian van Delft: GREGH - Groupement de Recherche et d'Etudes en Gestion à HEC - HEC Paris - Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

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Abstract: This paper presents incentive schemes in the framework of a collaborative purchasing cost reduction process with a supplier implementing a continuous improvement plan. Using a stochastic decision process formulation, we analyze the structure of the optimal policy and characterize its numerical robustness through numerical applications solved by dynamic programming. Then, we analyze two purchaser incentive schemes observed in practice. First, we describe some theoretical properties of the policies associated with these two schemes (schemes I and II) and show that these policies exhibit nonoptimal structures. Second, we estimate the quantitative loss for typical parameter values and, in particular, we show that for certain businesses this loss is significant. Then, we propose two easy-to-implement improvements (schemes III and IV), which result in near-optimal solutions and a significant impact on purchasing cost performances.

Keywords: purchaser incentives; collaborative cost reduction process; continuous improvement; stochastic decision process; dynamic programming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-07
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in International Transactions in Operational Research, 2014, 21 (4), pp.673-701. ⟨10.1111/itor.12059⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01025958

DOI: 10.1111/itor.12059

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