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As the COVID-19 pandemic continued unabatedly, many global supply chains involved in manufacturing and distributing personal protective equipment often failed to meet surge demand due to production capacity limits. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the existing medical mask supply chain in Taiwan was decentralized, but immediately following the outbreak in 2020, the government of Taiwan established a centralized virtual company that integrated production, distribution, and sales. We use an exploratory empirical case study to gain insights into Taiwan's innovative public-private collaboration and the relationship between collaborative activities and supply chain resilience. This paper examines how a ten-fold growth, from 1.88 million to 20 million, in the daily production of medical masks, and their equitable distribution was achieved within four months of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The results indicate that the public-private collaboration through a government-led centralized supply chain mitigated the impacts of unpredictable disruptions, built supply chain resilience, and ensured mask availability to the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impacts of exogenous government subsidies on recycled material flows in decentralised reverse supply chains where players behave according to their own interests. We present a four-tiered network equilibrium model consisting of the sources of electronic scrap products and the collectors, processors and demand markets. We mathematically transform the players’ optimality conditions governing players’ behaviours into a variational inequality formulation. We investigate the impact of alternate schemes of government subsidies on the equilibrium amount, subsidy effectiveness and subsidy elasticity. The real-world case study shows that subsidising the tier of processors demonstrates the superiority of the investigated performance measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When a firm agrees to pay a higher price to a key parts supplier in order to guarantee availability when an unexpected supply chain disruption or a strong demand in a retail market causes a scarcity of a needed material, both the purchase price and the acquired quantity behave in a positive relationship, which is an uncommon but important characteristic in the design of supply chain transaction contracts. This article investigates the design of transaction contracts in the supply chain of a manufacturer and a supplier, where the supplier (upstream firm) determines the form of positive relationship of scarce materials between the unit purchase price and the acquired quantity and the manufacturer (downstream firm) chooses the acquired quantity of materials after knowing the contract terms. We investigate two various charging schemes: uniform and block charging schemes. We show that despite the implementation of the block charging scheme, which seems unfavourable to the supplier since the supplier charges less at a low level of acquired quantities, the contract may return the same profits to the supplier as the uniform charging scheme, which seems favourable to the supplier since the supplier can charge a high transacted price for all quantities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since a semiconductor foundry plant manufactures a wide range of memory and logic products using the make-to-order business model, the product mix is an important production decision. This paper first describes the characteristics of the product mix planning problem in foundry manufacturing that are attributable to the long flow time and queuing network behaviors. The issues of time bucket selection, mix optimization and bottleneck-based planning are next addressed. A decision software system based on integer linear programming techniques and a heuristic procedure has been implemented for mix planning. Data provided by a wafer plant has been used to study problems related to product mix planning. It was determined that the suitable time bucket of planning is either one week or one month and the lead-time offset factor should be included in the logic of workload calculation. This paper also presents various facets of product mix decisions and how they should be integrated with operations management. Index Terms--Bottleneck analysis, product mix planning, semiconductor foundry manufacturing.