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Dell's Supply Chain

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1 Introduction
A supply chain may be defined as an integrated process wherein a number of various business entities (i.e., suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers) work together in an effort to: (1) acquire raw materials, (2) convert these raw materials into specified final products, and (3) deliver these final products to retailers. This chain is traditionally characterized by a forward flow of materials and a backward flow of information. For years, researchers and practitioners have primarily investigated the various processes of the supply chain individually. Recently, however, there has been increasing attention placed on the performance, design, and analysis of the supply chain as a whole. From a practical standpoint, the supply chain concept arose from a number of changes in the manufacturing environment, including the rising costs of manufacturing, the shrinking resources of manufacturing bases, shortened product life cycles, the leveling of the playing field within manufacturing, and the globalization of market economies. The current interest has sought to extend the traditional supply chain to include ìreverse logisticsî, to include product recovery for the purposes of recycling, re-manufacturing, and re-use. Within manufacturing research, the supply chain concept grew largely out of two-stage multi-echelon inventory models, and it is important to note that considerable progress has been made in the design and analysis of two-echelon systems. Most of the research in this area is based on the classic work of Clark and Scarf (1960) and Clark and Scarf (1962). The interested reader is referred to Federgruen (1993) and Bhatnagar, et. al. (1993) for comprehensive reviews of models of this type. More recent discussions of two-echelon models may be found in Diks, et. al. (1996) and van
Houtum, et. al. (1996). The objectives of

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