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As the EU and the US successively proposed the carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) and the Clean Competition Act (CCA), importers are now required to declare the carbon emissions of their products. Particularly, wheel companies face increasing time pressure with the gradual development of implementation paths for net-zero emissions and implementing carbon pricing policies in various countries. This research uses the production data of Taiwan wheel companies to establish a mathematical model for the activity-based cost optimisation decision-making process. It explores the impact of different carbon emission costs on a company's product mix with pricing decisions. Further, the research proposes five mathematical programmes for single-period cost optimisation decision-making under carbon pricing. These models provide some detailed view, such as changes in profits and product mix caused by high carbon taxes or other changes for each resource. Furthermore, the production cost optimal model proposed in this research can be used by enterprises to fulfill their social responsibilities while ensuring profitability and serve as a reference for making net-zero transformation decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how the setup of special environmental courts is accountable for firms' internal adjustment of production and export across industries with different pollution intensities. Inspired by a simple theoretical model, we find that, after the establishment of environmental courts, firms see a larger decrease in export value, export quantity, export variety as well as export destination in more polluting industries. We further find different impacts on firms with varying ownership and size. These findings imply that companies reallocate their available resources from more polluting varieties to less polluting ones, thus turning green through this within‐firm adjustment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This teaching case creates an Escape Room experience for managerial accounting students to reinforce relevant costing and short-term decision concepts. Within the Escape Room, students analyze five short-term decisions within 50 minutes to "escape" for the weekend. Specifically, students identify relevant information, perform the necessary calculations, and evaluate their results to make a recommendation on how to improve firm profitability. The Escape Room seeks to build a greater understanding of relevant costing by creating a narrative, linking the five short-term decisions, and formatting every decision using an input-process-output (IPO) framework. The Escape Room also uses gamification elements to promote engagement and interest in learning these concepts. Students agree that the Escape Room increases engagement and fosters an understanding of relevant costing and short-term decision concepts. We see one of the strongest benefits of the Escape Room is its ability to scale across class formats and provide automatic feedback to students. Data Availability: Data are available upon request. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Diálogo com a Economia Criativa is the property of Dialogo com a Economia Criativa and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Product mix optimisation is one of the most important strategic decisions determining the product type and the corresponding quantity to maximise the system throughput. This paper proposes a new heuristic named shifting bottleneck-driven TOC heuristic (STOCh) for solving product mix problems with multiple bottleneck resources. STOCh is comprised of master product schedule (MPS) generation and its local adjustment. The major improvement is that STOCh dynamically identifies and utilises shifting bottlenecks, rather than fixed bottlenecks commonly used in the existing literature, to avoid being caught in a local optimum. Besides, local adjustment strategy can refine neighbourhood space and limit the search in a high-quality solution space to gain better solutions. Numerical studies show that STOCh outperforms three most famous TOC heuristics in the existing literature, i.e. RTOCh, TOC_AK and TOC_SN. The average relative deviation of the solutions by STOCh from the optimal solutions by CPLEX is only around 3%. Further results show that STOCh performs particularly well when facing multiple bottleneck scenarios, especially when the capacity of bottleneck resource is very scarce. A case study based on real data from a SME in China demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed STOCh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the impact of import competition on energy efficiency among firms in China. Using a difference-in-differences approach that exploits industry- and firm-level tariff reductions following China's accession to the WTO, we examine the effects of reduced output tariffs on coal intensity, measured as coal use per output, of Chinese manufacturing firms. Our findings indicate that higher levels of import competition lead to significant reductions in coal intensity, without negatively affecting firm production levels. We also find evidence that these effects are primarily driven by multi-product firms adjusting their product mix to prioritize energy-saving options. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an increasing awareness in scheduling research that human behaviour needs to be considered explicitly in scheduling models. Although most scheduling literature ignores human behaviour, especially sequence-dependent processing times form a good basis for explicit consideration. Hence, a processing time function is derived that considers the effects of learning, forgetting, fatigue and recovery. The necessity for explicit human consideration can be regarded as most urgent for unpaced highly-manual mixed-model assembly lines. Based on real data a simulation study is conducted to determine the effect of explicit human consideration while also taking into account the effects of different idealised schedule types and the product mix. The results strongly indicate that the product mix has a consistently high impact on scheduling objectives, the schedule type affects lower-level objectives like starving and blocking times to a greater extent than higher-level objectives like makespan and flow time, and that for certain objectives the height of the objective values and the relative favourability of schedule types depends on human consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Petroleum Refinery Engineering is the property of Petroleum Refinery Engineering Editorial Office and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Industria Textila is the property of Institutul National de Cercetare-Dezvoltare pentru Textile si Pielarie and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper deals with the production scheduling problem with customer-driven demand substitution. We consider a manufacturing system in a make-to-stock environment which is potentially able to produce a large variety of product options (the so-calledlong-termproduct assortment) but, for reasons of capacity and operative limitations, only a subset of those options can be available in stock at the same time (the so-calledshort-termproduct assortment). In such a context, typical of fields wherehigh-varietystrategies are applied, the first-choice option of the customer could be unavailable at a certain instant of time. In that case, if production is planned by taking demand substitution issues into consideration, other options which are good substitutes will be available, thus increasing the probability that the customer chooses to substitute. The paper proposes two mixed-integer linear programming models (for both the lost sale case and the backorder case) for optimising the production schedule by jointly considering (i) capacity and production constraints, and costs on one hand, (ii) and demand substitution issues on the other hand. An extensive experimental analysis has allowed us to evaluate the models’ behaviour in a variety of operative scenarios and to draw some concluding remarks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Accurate order promising is a key requirement for customer satisfaction. Nevertheless, practitioners struggle with the reliability of the delivery dates they promise to customers. Consequently, the costs of demand fulfilment soar due to intensified communication, emergency processes in logistics and acquisition of costly external production resources. We identify and formalise product and process flexibilities in supply chains that can be exploited in production planning. Product flexibility is the possibility to produce several kinds of products from one predecessor product. Process flexibility is the possibility to use one production process to manufacture several products. In order to increase the accuracy and robustness of delivery dates, we develop an order promising methodology able to deal with demand mix uncertainty and heterogeneous customer order lead times. The approach anticipates changes in production plans made possible by product and process flexibilities. In a numerical study based on a case from the semiconductor industry, we demonstrate that our method increases the accuracy and robustness of order promises. For the studied case, we find that the consideration of process flexibility is more important for the generation of accurate and robust order promises than the consideration of product flexibility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates the impact of separating the affiliated businesses from rail operations and the associated efficiency gain on firms' exporting decisions by rail. First, an economic model was built to analytically show that an efficiency improvement in rail operations would increase the firm's product variety but decreases the skewness of export by rail. The paper then utilized China's rail reform to separate the affiliated businesses from the rail sector in 2003 as a quasi-natural experiment and adopted the difference-in-differences (DID) method to empirically verify and quantify the analytical findings. Specifically, it is found the reform to separate the affiliated businesses significantly improved the efficiency of China's rail operations. The resultant efficiency gain then encouraged firms to export by rail, with more variety of export products and higher value. More importantly, the firm's skewness of export by rail has also been reduced. The relevant policy implications have also been provided. • This paper considers China's rail reform to separate the affiliated businesses from the rail sector in 2003. • We examine the effects of the reform on the efficiency of rail operations and the product mix of export by rail. • We find that the reform improved the efficiency of China's rail operations. • Firms' skewness of export by rail was reduced by the reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The business activities of bank and non-bank financial institutions are growing rapidly, ranging from banking, insurance, pawnshops, to cooperatives. However, the most rapid development occurred in state-owned banking. The main reason people switch to State- Owned Banking is a more secure security factor compared to Privateowned Banking. Bank BTN as a long-standing bank in State-Owned Banks is a bank of interest, only Bank BTN occupies the fourth position under BRI, Mandiri and BNI. In this study the authors want to see the effect of product mix on customer loyalty at Bank BTN (Persero) Sukabumi City Branch. The result of the research is that there is a significant effect of the product mix on customer loyalty at Bank BTN [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Matched firm-level balance sheet and partner- and product-level foreign trade data can be used to examine the relationship between the product mix and productivity of firms, as well as other characteristics, such as size or ownership structure (share of foreign ownership). The conclusions to be drawn on the basis of foreign trade data are supplemented by the results of analyses with production and domestic sales data. For this purpose and for the longitudinal analysis of foreign trade data, the two classification systems had to be harmonized. According to foreign trade data, the important components of the expansion of companies' export range besides productivity are the import range, the firm size, and the share of foreign ownership. Production and domestic sales data only partially support these conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agricultural producer organisations, the entities which aim at grouping farmers together, have become increasingly important in the food supply chain. In addition, they are widely viewed as having the potential to considerably contribute to rural people's wellbeing. Yet, we have only a limited understanding of the way in which these collective action organisations operate on the market. In response to this, the paper makes two contributions. First, our research documents an enormous variety in market behaviour of these organisations. This concerns both the product mix they offer and marketing channels they use. Second, drawing on recent advancements in theories of the firm, our analysis seeks to provide some insights on the nature and determinants of this heterogeneity. While the evidence we provide reflects merely conditional correlations, it points to two interesting regularities. On the one hand, it suggests that supplying large retail chains is positively associated with the organisations' size and openness to accept deliveries from non-members. On the other hand, it suggests that organisations operating in a more competitive environment offer less products than organisations that face lower pressure from the competition. Our specific example comes from the fruit and vegetable sector in Poland, a country which is among the biggest fruit and vegetable producers in the European Union. • We have only a limited understanding of the way in which agricultural producer organisations (POs) operate on the market. • Our research documents an enormous variety in market behaviour of POs. • POs under study are often multiproduct organisations that combine simultaneously different marketing channels. • POs supplying retail chains seem to be larger and more open to accept deliveries from non-members than other POs. • POs operating in a more competitive environment offer less products than POs that face lower pressure from the competition. • Our example comes from the fruit and vegetable sector in Poland, one of the biggest fruit and vegetable producers in the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of multi-level contribution margin accounting in cost accounting is to analyze the profitability of products and organizational entities with appropriate allocation of fixed costs and to provide relevant information for short-term, medium- and longer-term decisions. However, the conventional framework of multi-level contribution margin accounting does not usually incorporate a mathematical optimization method that simultaneously integrates variable and fixed costs to determine the best possible product mix within hierarchically structured organizations. This may be surprising in that operations research provides an optimization model in the form of the fixed-charge problem (FCP) that takes into account not only variable costs but also fixed costs of the activities to be planned. This paper links the two approaches by expanding the FCP to a multi-level fixed-charge problem (MLFCP), which maps the hierarchical decomposition of fixed costs in accordance with multi-level contribution margin accounting. In this way, previously hidden optimization potentials can be made visible within the framework of multi-level contribution margin accounting. Applying the linkage to a case study illustrates that the original assessment of profitability gained on the sole basis of a multi-level contribution margin calculation might turn out to be inappropriate or even inverted as soon as mathematical optimization is utilized: products, divisions, and other reference objects for fixed cost allocation, which at first glance seem to be profitable (or unprofitable) might be revealed as actually unprofitable (or profitable), when the multi-level contribution margin calculation is linked to the MLFCP. Furthermore, the proposed concept facilitates assessment of the costs of an increasing variant diversity, which also demonstrates that common rules on how to interpret a multi-level contribution margin calculation may have to be revised in some cases from the viewpoint of optimization. Finally, the impact of changes in the fixed cost structure and other parameters is tested via sensitivity analyses and stochastic optimization.

The textile industry has been massively affected by structural changes in recent years. The fashion market is currently in a phase of stagnation. This means that market saturation has been reached, competition between companies and retailers has increased, and predatory competition has set in. Gains in market share are mainly achieved through an aggressive pricing policy, for example, through earlier price reductions. Nonetheless, there are still uncertainties regarding specific product mix-related marketing measures in fashion markets. There is a lack of scientific evidence about the exact proportion of product mix-related marketing measures used. As an aim, this study focuses on the effects of various influencing factors on consumer loyalty. Factors examined include product quality, product selection, service quality and price-to-performance ratio. To investigate the proportion of the chosen marketing measures, a conceptual model was proposed, four hypotheses were derived. In order to shed more light on fashion markets related marketing measures, the research methodology of cross-sectional face-to-face survey research was applied. For this purpose, randomly sampled fashion shoppers were asked to answer a questionnaire, using tablets. The collected data were then analysed using multiple regression and evaluated. Implications for Central European audience: The study has derived some remarkable key findings that contrast with other non-fashion markets. First of all, service quality is not the most important factor, whereas product quality is an important criterion for the price-to-product ratio and consequently, for customer loyalty. Finally, practical guidelines are provided, limitations discussed and suggestions for future research provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we address the problem of defining the product mix in order to maximise a system's throughput. This problem is well known for being NP-Complete and therefore, most contributions to the topic focus on developing heuristics that are able to obtain good solutions for the problem in a short CPU time. In particular, constructive heuristics are available for the problem such as that by Fredendall and Lea, and by Aryanezhad and Komijan. We propose a new constructive heuristic based on the Theory of Constraints and the Knapsack Problem. The computational results indicate that the proposed heuristic yields better results than the existing heuristic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In today's dynamic market environment, rapidly changing customer preferences increase the customization of products and the diversification of demand mix. Companies should understand how the demand mix influences supply chain performance and react properly to fulfil customer satisfaction as to what the customers want. This paper investigated the impact of information sharing of the demand mix on the supply chain performance, under increasing product customization, by changing customer demand pattern and production capacity. The results of simulation analysis demonstrated that a demand mix can be determined that produces the best supply chain performance. A real multi-echelon automotive supply chain was analysed for each of six performance measures and the demand mix information significantly influenced five of them. Demand variation and production capacity also resulted in significant impact on the performance measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Uludağ Journal of Economy & Society / Uludağ Üniversitesi İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Fakültesi Dergisi is the property of Uludag Journal of Economy & Society and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study aims to identify the relationship between product mix elements and consumer's buying behavior in Amman City – Jordan .To identify the relationship between product mix elements and consumer's buying behavior, specific independent variables such as product package , brand name , product information and product quality has been considered .The researchers designed a questionnaire based on previous studies and the questionnaire was given out to 500 respondents out of which 460 were returned, only 430 were valid for the analytical descriptive study. SPSS was used to analyze the data. The main result of this study indicates that the product's quality, information, brand name and package has a significant positive relationship on consumers' buying behavior, were product information and product quality had the most contribution which effect consumers' buying behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During pneumatic control system design, the critical value for choosing the appropriate pneumatic actuator is the weight of the workpiece. In the case of flexible production systems, which are the core part of the Industry 4.0 (I4.0) concept, the weight of the workpieces is often variable, since the crucial feature of this kind of production is its ability to deal with variable parts. Therefore, in order to deal with the variable weight of parts, a pneumatic actuator is chosen according to the heaviest part. However, according to another I4.0 principle, energy efficient operation of machines, the previous criteria for choosing a pneumatic actuator is energy efficient only when handling the heaviest part. In all other cases, operation of the pneumatic actuator is suboptimal in terms of energy efficiency. Aiming to solve this problem, this paper considers the possibility of using a new pressure regulator instead of traditional manually adjusted pressure regulators. This regulator provides operating pressure modification in real-time in accordance with the weight of the workpieces. In this way, the optimal compressed air consumption is ensured for each workpiece. Implementation of this device has yielded significant energy savings; however, the value is variable and depends on working task characteristics.

The theory of constraints (TOC) is a management tool, which considers any manageable system as being limited in reaching more of its objectives by some constraints. According to TOC, there is always, at least, one single constraint, and TOC implements a concentrating process to detect the constraint and restructure the remaining of the organization around it. This paper presents an overview of different perspectives of TOC and its implementation in different industries such as project management, quality management, outsourcing, product mix, make-to-buy, accounting, banking and health care, etc. The results indicate that the method has been extensively implemented in different areas of accounting.

We use simulations to examine the impact of cost allocation errors on pricing and product-mix decisions. We compare the imperfect cost allocation of cost systems based on heuristics to the ideal cost allocation of a benchmark model. First, we find that more complex cost systems are associated with substantially lower profit errors. Second, we decompose the profit error and find that production quantity errors are larger than product portfolio errors indicating that reducing product portfolio errors is less critical in designing cost systems. We also document that overproduction errors are larger than underproduction errors and errors from keeping unprofitable products are larger than errors from dropping profitable products suggesting that cost systems tend to underestimate full costs. Third, we find that profit errors increase for more complex cost systems as resource sharing levels rise, which is an interesting counter intuitive result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]