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This book presents the latest developments concerning techniques, tools, and methodologies in supply chain ecosystems. It gathers contributions from a variety of experts, who analyze a range of case studies and industrial sectors such as manufacturing, energy, agricultural, healthcare, humanitarian logistics, and urban goods distribution, to name but a few. The book is chiefly intended to meet the needs of two sectors: firstly, the academic sector, so as to familiarize students, professors, and researchers with the tools that are now being used to optimize supply chains; and secondly, the industrial and managerial sector, so that supply chain management practitioners can benefit from methods and tools that are yielding valuable results in other contexts.

In the industrial world, companies are always seeking competitive advantages to sustain themselves in the globalized market. A supply chain is one of these improvements that managers implement in order to stay ahead of the competition. However, certain methods of supply chains add risks such as the addition of costs, possible accidents, and economic losses. Because of this, companies are looking for techniques in which to progress their supply chain execution. The Handbook of Research on Industrial Applications for Improved Supply Chain Performance is a pivotal reference source that identifies techniques, tools, and methodologies that can improve supply chain performance and enable businesses to generate a competitive advantage in the globalized market. While highlighting topics such as material flow, route optimization, and green distribution, this publication is ideally designed for managers, executives, logistics engineers, production managers, warehouse operations managers, board directors, consultants, analysts, inventory control managers, researchers, academicians, industrial and managerial professionals, practitioners, and students looking to improve costs and quality of supply chains.

This book provides some regional aspects considered by manufacturing firms in their decisions to gain competitiveness and have effects on the performance of their supply chains (SC). Some of the main aspects considered are: government's policies, fixed costs, the availability and quality of infrastructure services. This book also discusses the risks for the SC; based on a perception approach, some aspects studied are: demand, suppliers and production processes and how these are related to other elements of the SC. The authors use structural modeling to analyze the evaluation of some manufacturing practices and their impact on customer service satisfaction, agility and flexibility of the SC. The context of this study is immersed in the Mexican manufacturing industry of exportation, also known as maquiladora industry of Ciudad Juarez, México. This borderland is among the top 10 manufacturing Mexican cities. World class industries are located in this region and have been recognized around the world for their competitiveness and high performance. Therefore, the methods and results exposed in this book may be valuable and useful for readers and researchers of the SC worldwide.