Essays in retail operations management
Retailing is an industry characterized by wide variations in the financial performance of firms measured by their stock returns and the incidence of bankruptcy, and in the operating performance of firms measured by their gross margins, inventory turns, gross margin return on inventory, and return on assets. This dissertation is comprised of two parts focused on operations management issues in retailing. In the first part, we use financial data from all publicly listed retailing firms across eleven segments for the period from 1979 to 1998 to study cross-sectional differences in and interrelationships between operating performance variables. We find that after controlling for these interrelationships, the operating performance variables explain a substantial fraction of the variation in long-term stock returns of firms. In the second part of the dissertation, we consider the joint vehicle routing and inventory control problem in a supermarket chain for a private truck fleet delivering from a central distribution center (DC) to multiple stores. Typically, logistics managers use a hierarchical approach to solve this problem, first determining delivery times for each store, and then planning routes by solving a vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). We present a generalized minimum weight matching based approach to solve the joint problem to optimality in polynomial time when each route is restricted to at most two deliveries. We then apply this method to present a randomized algorithm for the general problem with unrestricted number of deliveries per route. We describe the implementation of our algorithm at a large supermarket chain. Our numerical tests show that the company can achieve savings of about 12% of its distribution cost by applying this algorithm.
Year of publication: |
2001-01-01
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Authors: | Gaur, Vishal |
Publisher: |
ScholarlyCommons |
Saved in:
freely available
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