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Supply chains are the life-lines of society and disturbances or disruptions should be avoided where possible. Secured by adequate protection is possible, but this is based on supply chain designs that are already in place. Designing secure supply chains means to understand security in relation to other supply chain design issues. What the right issues are and how to apply them and with the support of what type of tools is not well understood yet. In this article a set of suitable concepts from desk-research from several scientific fields are identified. These concepts compiled in a descriptive supply chain design framework can guide supply chain designers during the design of (secure) supply chains.

This summary provides a brief account of the background, approach, analysis and conclusions of this thesis. Construction is characterized as a high hazard industry which contains a wide range of activities including construction, alteration and/or repair (Michaels, 2010). The organizations involved in construction projects are project owner, designer, contractor/sub-contractors, suppliers. According to Benton&McHenry (2010), the material-delivery system is an important success factor for a construction project, which involves many companies such as professionals and suppliers. However, suppliers, which have limited control on a construction project, are an important organization involved in a material-delivery system of construction projects. Thus improvements on the performance of suppliers can contribute to an effective and efficient material-delivery system of a construction project. In a construction project, last-minute deliveries are one of the problems suppliers have encountered. Therefore, this research is based on the notion that reducing the influences exerted by last-minute deliveries on construction supply chain can improve suppliers’ performance, which in turn contributes to an effective and efficient material-delivery system of a construction project. It aims to explore how the construction supply chain should be in order to have less last-minute deliveries. The main research questions stem from these ideas and are defined as follows: How can the planning process be organized for suppliers from a supply chain perspective in order to lead to a better process with less last minute deliveries to construction sites? To answer this main research question, first a literature review is conducted to explore what is already known about how to improve the performance of material-delivery system of construction projects. Prior work on the improvement of material-delivery system was found to address some issues on two aspects: 1) Construction project management Increase the material-delivery system of construction projects from a project management perspective 2) Construction supply chain Increase the material-delivery system of construction projects from a supply chain perspective But improving the performance of construction supply chain from a supplier’s perspective by reducing the number of last-minute deliveries is not explored. To answer the main research questions, seven research sub-questions are formulated. The process of answering the sub questions are divided into two phases: analysis phase and design phase. The analysis phase is focusing on clarifying the current problem situation and the reasons for higher number of last-minute deliveries to construction sites. While the design phase aims to identifying best practices concerning construction supply chain and applying these practices to the supply chain of one construction projects supplier --- Legrand B.V.. The seven research sub-questions are listed below: Analysis Phase 1) What is the current situation related to the construction organization, supply chain process and the problem of last minute-deliveries 2) What is the current situation related to the planning process for construction supply chain? 3) What are the reasons for a higher number of last-minute deliveries in construction projects? Design Phase 4) What are the best practices concerning the planning process in construction projects from a supply chain perspective so far? 5) What can be learned by evaluating the best practices in the current situation in order to make recommendations on how the redesigned planning process should be? 6) What is the recommendation on how the planning process can be organized in construction projects from a supply chain perspective? 7) What are the benefits of the recommended solutions for both Legrand and related stakeholders? In this thesis, a multi-method strategy including interview, document review and literature review is used for data collection in order to increase the credibility and validity of the results (K.Yin, 2003). Additionally, root-cause analysis is also used to find the root cause of higher number of last-minute deliveries to construction sites. The first two research sub-questions are about identifying the current situations with respect to construction organization structure, construction supply chain, problem scale of last minute deliveries and the current planning process in construction projects from a supply chain perspective, thus related data are needed to collect to visualize these current situations. In this research, literature review and document review are conducted to identify the current situations. Additionally, eight interviews in related construction organizations also contribute to the identification of the current situations. Thus, the credibility and validity of the current situation are increased by employing these three kinds of data collection methods. In chapter 4 which is for answering research sub-question 3, root-cause analysis is used to identify the root causes for higher number of last-minute deliveries to construction sites. Root cause is the most basic reason for an undesirable condition or problem which, if eliminated or decreased, would have prevented or mitigated it from occurring (Paulf, Dell, & Anderson, 1993). In this research, one of the technic for root cause analysis ----- events and causal factors analysis is chosen as a tool for analyzing, because the construction organization is complex and also there are surrounding conditions (Paulf, Dell, & Anderson, 1993). For research sub-question 4 which is focusing on finding the best practices concerning the planning process in the construction projects from a supply chain perspective, literature review is considered as a method. According to Yin (2003), one approach which can be considered as an analytic strategy is to use analytic technique such as creating some requirements and showing if some evidence satisfies those requirements. Thus in this research, sub question 5 and 6 are answered by displaying all the alternative solutions identified in Chapter 4 and evaluating them in the current situation by means of balanced scorecard. According to the interviews and related document, literatures, it derives that there are three controllable root causes for the higher number of last-minute deliveries to construction sites:  Viable demand from client  Imperfect design  Lack of communication among construction contractors In order to reduce the number of last-minute deliveries to construction sites caused by the three controllable root causes, five recommendations have been made for the suppliers involved in construction projects. The five recommendations have different priorities. The most promising strategies are Partnership development, and building information modeling. Firstly, by participating into the design phase of a construction project and simulating the whole construction process, not only the number of rush orders caused by imperfect design and lack of communication among the whole construction organization can be reduced, but also this strategy can benefit the whole construction organizations. On the other hand, agile supply chain, logistics centers are also two strategies which can improve supplier’s construction supply chain performance by quickly responding customers’ needs, therefore mitigating the influences exerted by rush orders. Thirdly, postponement by means of modularization, standardization is also a promising strategy, although most of the electrical materials for construction projects are already standardized. It indicates that the standardization can be improved to a more detailed level, which makes the assembly on sites more flexible, so urgent demands from customers can be satisfied more quickly. This thesis contributes to both theory and management in the following ways: With respect to the academic contribution of this research, it can be found on the integration of expertise and research efforts aiming to result in the advancement of knowledge on the field of construction supply chain management and logistics. It may resolve theoretical questions such as whether the number of last-minute deliveries in construction projects can be reduced by redesign the construction supply chain. Bridging this scientific gap can lead in substantial conclusions and valuable practical applications. In addition, the managerial contribution of this research can be seen on the number of managerial terms intervening in this endeavor. Since several years ago, most of the manufacturing companies recognized that supply chain management can be a new way of doing business. The implementation of this new approach was a consequence of various changes in manufacturing environments. All these indicate that construction logistics is an interesting area for construction suppliers to make higher profit. Also, for construction project managers, construction logistics can help them understand the projects and the planning procedure better.

The degree of supply chain risk faced by many companies has risen dramatically and the impact of disruptions can cascade easily across companies’ and countries’ borders. To handle this increased vulnerability, systematic approaches and decision making tools are needed to provide support in managing supply chain disruptions. In this thesis, an integrated process: InForMDRiSC, and an agent-based simulation framework are presented and discussed. These two contributions are complementary means for managing supply chain disruptions. InForMDRiSC describes the steps to be followed in managing supply chain disruptions, whereas the simulation framework supports the building of simulation models for specific supply chains which enable decision makers to experiment with different strategies and tactics to prevent or recover from supply chain disruptions.

The chemical marketplace is a global one with strong competition between man- ufacturers. To continuously meet the customer demands regarding product quality and delivery conditions without the need to maintain very large stor- age levels chemical manufactures need to strive for production on demand. In this thesis we research how market-oriented production can be realized for the particular class of multi-grade continuous processes. For this class of processes production on demand is particularly challenging due to the the complex trade- off between performing costly and time-consuming changeovers and maintaining high storage levels. The first requirement for market-oriented production is that production management cooperates with purchasing and sales management. We propose the use of a scheduler as a decision support system in a cooperative organization constituted by these players. In such a scheduler, decision making is represented using decision variables and their effect on the company-wide objective, which is chosen to be the added value of the company, is modeled. The scheduler then selects a decision strategy that is optimal with respect to the objective and presents this strategy to the decision makers who use it to base their actual decision taking on. The company-market interaction is modeled using a transaction-based mod- eling framework. Therein not the actual market behavior is modeled but the expected effect of the interaction of the company with the market. Two types of transactions can be modeled in this framework: orders, which result from contracts with suppliers and customers, and opportunities, which express the expected sales and purchases. Two different approaches to the modeling of production decisions are taken, the choice of which depends largely on the im- plementation of the process control hierarchy that is assumed. In the first approach, production management and control is performed by a single level controller and the control decisions are the minute to minute manipulation of the valves. This approach is academically interesting, though practically in- tractable due to the combination of long horizons and fast sampling times. In the second approach the process control hierarchy consists of a scheduling layer at which it is determined what products will be produced when, and a process control layer which determines how this production is realized. This approach is taken in the rest of the thesis.

During the design supply chain control processes, balancing cost versus service plays an important role. To select the most suitable replenishment strategy is the main enabler in reaching the goal of finding the optimal balance. In this article a framework is developed which will help to select the right replenishment strategy and to design a supply chain control process that supports companies to secure the results of improvements. During the evaluation of replenishment strategies in the design phase of the project it becomes clear that in specific situations one single replenishment strategy will not cover the overall control need in supply chains, especially in fast growing or emerging markets. In those specific situations the best replenishment strategy is a combination of re-order-point and kanban. This paper is based on experience gained during a supply chain control study at a Philips business.

Master thesis project on the application of a systems approach to improve organizational performance. The demand planning process at a pharmaceutical company is analyzed to identify the root causes for the low performance levels at their local sales organizations. These root causes are translated into a redesign of the demand planning system to achieve better results.

Researchers and practitioners explain that in traditional collaborations between housing associations and contractors, there is a difference in culture, a lack of trust and ill collaboration. In combination with the economic crisis, the climate change and the more demanding end users, this demands a change in the way parties cooperate. Supply chain integration is used as a method to eliminate the problems that exist in the traditional collaboration. However, most supply chain integrations are still premature and there is insufficient information about what the experiences of the experts are regarding successes and problems related to the FLOTIQ aspects. These FLOTIQ aspects stand for Finance, Learning, Organization, Time, Information and Quality. This research combines and compares information of literature with the experiences of practitioners via a questionnaire and case study research. The questionnaire analyzed two populations: respondents with and with no experience in order to determine ‘which experiences do experts in supply chain integration have regarding successes and problems related to the FLOTIQ management aspects?’. For both successes and problems, the experts have different experiences per aspect. The most common successes are: transparency, client satisfaction and efficiency. The most frequent problems are: bad communication, unclear goals and expectations and personal gain first. Successes are repeated in two thirds of the time, but so are the problem, leading to unnecessary insufficiencies. Parties are making some improvements in their process, but there is no clear distinction between the respondent with and with no experience, which strongly gives the impression that parties are conduction an upgrade of a building team, instead of performing supply chain integration. The most relevant recommendations is to have horizontal and vertical communication between colleagues, to monitor and evaluate the project based on preset KPi’s and to actively learn from the information derived from these evaluations.

Due to confidentiality only the summary of this final thesis is available. As a consequence of global policy, P&G Pet Care has to lower their inventory levels. Several measures have been taken, however they did not fulfill the stated target. Therefore other methods/theories, like multi-echelon, are needed to lower the total inventory. During this research one multi-echelon method and several other methods which will lower the inventory level are tested with a simulation model. It could be concluded that the highest benefit could not be reached by implementing a multi-echelon theory, but by standardizing the production schedule and optimizing the current system.

Hobaho as the second largest intermediary company in the flower bulb business has been suffering from stagnant and declining development in recent three years. Its broker business with lily bulb market has decreased more seriously comparing to other bulb species, which dropped from 27% to 20% in recent three year. Due to the frustrated marketing share Hobaho decide to investigate the possible future strategy from the supply chain perspective in order to save its lily business. This master thesis focuses on Chinese lily bulb market as Hobaho’s target supply chain destination in terms of the marvelous development in floriculture in China. The goal of this project is to find out the most effective and efficient supply chain role for Hobaho in the lily bulb export-import process into China and then strategy and implement will be develop which fits Hobaho’s mission and vision. The process of this project consist of five phases, there are namely: analysis internal & external bulb business; research of bulb supply chain; design performance-risk measurement tools; application tools on developed different scenarios; implementing optimal scenario After designed a supply chain measurement tool, the current roles of Hobaho and four scenarios have been evaluated and compared. Ultimately to be an intermediary with Chinese bulb stakeholder has been top one scenario to develop according to Hobaho’s current consideration and capacity. Based on the chosen scenario, the main strategy to facilitate Chinese bulb stakeholder is offering one stop service to their clients. A potential clients list has been offered accompany with some feasible implement plans which based on time-phase. Moreover some new thoughts of future Chinese bulb market have been present for Hobaho future opportunities.

Managing today's multi-actor systems, such as supply chains, is becoming an increasingly challenging task given developments in the markets, e.g. globalization, and in technology, e.g. the Internet. Today's managers are faced with increasing competition and globalization in an ever increasingly complex and dynamic system. Multiple tools exist to support managers in gaining more insight into these kinds of systems, such as simulation models or case-studies. Business games are another tool that can be used to support managers. A leading question in the development and usage of business games concerns the effectiveness of these two activities, e.g. development may take too long, or the business game does not address its intended purpose. During this research we have designed and implemented a suite of software services that support the development and usage of business games in a distributed, Internet-mediated context. With the games we support players in getting prepared for today's management challenges. This is among others accomplished by supporting the games to be played in a continuous fashion, and the usage of computer-controlled actors to increase the games' complexity and dynamics. The games that we developed with this suite have been played at numerous universities and business schools in a variety of settings, among which a global competition played at the same time with 11 universities. The students' educational levels that played the games developed with our suite vary from undergraduate to (Executive) MBA. The games that have been developed with our suite can be accessed online and played with at http://www.gscg.org.

The research presented in the thesis contains a part of the ongoing effort to improve the situation of the Dutch construction sector. For at least the last decade, a number of measures known as integrated contracting has been heralded as the solution for many problems in the Dutch construction industry. One of the main reasons for integrated contracting is to stimulate suppliers adopting innovative solutions. The innovative solutions can lead to bids with a lower price, more value or both. However, not all possibilities of the integrated contracting philosophy are utilised, due to the dominance of the lowest price award mechanism. Effective integrated contracting calls for the application of the Economically Most Advantageous Tender (EMAT) award mechanism, which increases the chance for bids with a better value price ratio. However, the application of the EMAT award mechanism is not widespread, because it is perceived as more complicated than the traditional lowest price award mechanism. The main barrier for the implementation of EMAT is the lack of information on how to formulate suitable EMAT award mechanisms, leading to the main question of this research: Which EMAT award mechanisms are suitable for the Dutch construction industry? The research takes an empirical approach in order answer this question. First, suitability requirements are formulated. Then, information is collected on EMAT award mechanisms that are applied in the procurement practice. The matching of the two leads to an overview of suitable EMAT award mechanism elements that are then combined into a decision tree. Several EMAT types were encountered during this investigation. In order to analyse these different types, the value price model is developed. The value price model is a graphical representation of a procurement situation. Two preference systems are distinguished namely a system that bases preference on the highest value price ratio and a system that bases preference on the highest difference between value and price. The introduction of several constraints in the value price model defines the procurement space. Furthermore, the strategies of ‘price minimisation’, ‘value maximisation’ and ‘value price optimisation’ can be represented in the model. Based on this model, the concept of ‘bidding freedom’ is introduced. The bidding freedom is the share of the theoretically maximum possible added value compared to the price of the theoretical most expensive competitive bid. Several requirements determine whether an EMAT award mechanism is suitable or not. Legal requirements are ‘non-discrimination’, ‘proportionality’ and ‘transparency’. Practical requirements are ‘sufficient bidding freedom’, ‘simplicity and elegance’ and the safeguarding of traditional project management requirements. The properties of twenty-four EMAT award mechanisms that were applied in practice are presented. Four main types are distinguished; the point system (six cases), the price correction system (eleven cases), the ratio system (two cases) and the value maximisation system (one case). Several developments are identified. The average “bidding freedom” is about 30% for cases from the civil sector and about 20% for the commercial sector, amounting to a combined bidding freedom of about 25%. In the civil sector, the most used award criterion is a process quality criterion, i.e. ‘quality of the project management plan’. Most used award criterion in the commercial sector is ‘functionality of the built object’, which is a product quality criterion. The ‘value minus price’ system and the ‘value price ratio’ system are both considered suitable. The design contest system should be discouraged. There is a preference for the price correction system over the point system when one chooses for a ‘value minus price’ system. Elements that should not be applied are weighed prices, discrete price-point relationships, discrete performance-money relationships, comparative score determination and price dependant value determination. Most striking observations were 1) the sudden appearance of ratio systems at the end of 2007, 2) the conclusion that procurement practice applies EMAT elements or systems that should be discouraged, and 3) the observation that the choice between procurement profit and profitability is not clear. Based on this research, procurers are recommended to use the developed EMAT award mechanism decision tree and to use the value price model to present results. Furthermore it will be rewarding for them to keep the EMAT award mechanism as simple as possible and to take eventual budgetary consequences of EMAT into account. Also, procurers are recommended to use curved performance-money relationships when appropriate and to manage knowledge. Finally, it is recommended that in the phases preceding the award phase enough design freedom is left, in order to keep awarding based on EMAT useful. Traditional construction companies operating in markets with integrated contracts are recommended to develop themselves towards integrated suppliers in order to remain competitive. Recommended topics for further investigation are the influence of the application of EMAT on the success of projects and on the reliability of bids. Furthermore it can be worthwhile to investigate whether the award criteria can also be used in other phases of the construction lifecycle. Finally the possibilities of streamlining and objectifying the award phase by the use of advanced ICT applications are interesting topics for further investigation. The policy of several Dutch governmental agencies to apply integrated contracting promises a bright future for the EMAT award mechanism.

An important issue in the design of secure supply chains is the understanding of the relation between supply chains and the organizational responsibility of specific parts of these supply chains. Organizational boundaries change over time by means of vertical and/or horizontal (des)-integration and so do the related organizational responsibilities. This paper provides an overview of possible intra- and inter-decoupling points in supply chain organizational responsibilities. All these decoupling positions will have implications on establishing supply chain security. Several reference models were explored and assessed on there usability to identify supply chain organizational relationships. Finally an extension on The Balanced Scorecard was proposed as reference model to identify secure supply chains organizational responsibility issues.

Supply chain partnerships within housing refurbishment have not been given much specific attention which may be found surprising because the refurbishment market is becoming of increasing importance compared to new construction and has specific characteristics that require adapted approaches to supply chain integration. In this paper approaches, expected benefits and challenges of supply chain partnerships within housing renovation are explored. From general literature on building process innovation, dimensions of supply chain integration and potential advantages and challenges of have been derived and employed in a preliminary inquiry among Dutch housing associations and their partners that are experimenting with supply chain partnering in housing refurbishment projects. The results indicate that approaches are in a relatively early stage of development towards ‘mature’ supply chain partnerships. Furthermore, many of the general expectations also apply to the Dutch housing refurbishment sector, but at a more detailed level, refurbishment may require specific attention for the division of tasks and risks between the partners, particularly regarding communication with tenants

The building industry is a fragmented and project-driven industry with specific characteristics, which can sometimes result in negative effects. Reference has often been made to other industries, particularly manufacturing, that would function more effectively and efficiently. Major differences between both include the organisation and coordination of the supply chain. Supply chain integration has been suggested as a solution for the building supply chain. This thesis has aimed to contribute to the conceptual development of supply chain integration for building by means of hypothesis-generating research. The concept of supply chain integration has first been explored on the basis of related thoughts and concepts in building practice and literature. The concept has been framed further based on four theoretical perspectives: economic, production, organisational and social theory. In the empirical part, supply chain integration practices have first been studied in six different industries: automotive, aerospace, computers, electronics, clothing and grocery. The findings have indicated advanced forms and high levels of supply chain integration. The building cases have included five firm types in the building supply chain: clients, developers, designers, builders and suppliers. The findings have demonstrated relatively less advanced and less comprehensive approaches to supply chain integration, as compared to theory and manufacturing. Based on the confrontation of the empirical findings with the theory, four hypotheses have been shaped representing partial descriptions of what constitutes a concept of supply chain integration in building. As a consequence, this would imply a shift of the building supply chain towards higher levels of repetitiveness and integration of products, processes and organisational arrangements.

This paper aims at studying the coordination of governmental actors, such as customs, and supply chain partners in order to mitigate risks. To do so the concepts of supply chain visibility and data pipeline are briefly revisited. Then the result of a survey, highlighting the risk coordination challenges, carried with customs and supply chain partners is presented. One of the main challenges identified is that business partners should incur the implementation costs of such systems while the benefits are not clear to them. To highlight the potential operational benefits gained through such systems for business partners, we consider counterfeiting risks and study how a coordinated risk management scheme between governmental actors and business partners leads to cost efficiency through less inspection costs and congestion-induced delay at ports

Improving service level at the lowest possible costs is and will always be one of the key objectives of Philips Electronics. This research illustrates how a part of the Philips supply chain control is setup /designed to support this objective. Within Philips, the business unit called Lumileds supplies LED’s to its customers. One of the components used to manufacture LED’s is made at the component manufacturer that is subject to this thesis. The objective of improving service levels at the lowest possible cost can be enabled by supply chain control. Of course superior service levels can be realized with excessive inventory levels. However that ignores the objective of lowest costs, because inventory cost money. Therefore an optimal balance between service level and inventory must be achieved. This balance depends on a number of different drivers like lead-time, lead-time variability, manufacturing quality and demand pattern. This research will define a model that generates advice to achieve the desired balance, taking into account all relevant drivers.

In the past decade, there has been an increasing number of natural disasters that led to catastrophic damage to mankind. China is one of the countries most affected by natural disasters in the world. Although logistics activities account for a large percentage of total operations in aftermath relief, they have frequently not been recognized as key levers for improving the effectiveness and efficiency of humanitarian organizations and as being crucial to operational excellence. Meanwhile, due to the large number of relief actors involved in the Chinese context, the coordination among various players becomes a very prominent challenge to cope with. Therefore, this master study aims to explore how to improve the coordination among actors in the Chinese relief chain context. This research consists of theoretical and empirical parts. In the theoretical party, this thesis explores the prospects of transferring lessons learnt from the commercial supply chain to the relief chain by finding out the existing coordination mechanisms in the commercial logistics operations. Some coordination mechanisms- i.e. Joint Procurement, Quick Response, Continuous Replenishment Program, Vendor Managed Inventory, Joint Managed Inventory, Continuous Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment and 3rd party logistics are the practiced coordination mechanisms in procurement, inventory and transportation processes together with corresponding characteristics and requirements to adopt them. Besides specific coordination mechanisms, generic lessons learnt from the commercial supply chain are also abstracted. They are Resource Sharing, Joint Decision Making and Outsourcing, which can be performed on strategic, tactical or operational levels based on the orientations of relationships among coordinating alliance. These experiences from the commercial supply chain come as a foreground for relief actors to step on. Although the objective of the relief chain and commercial supply chain remains the same i.e. delivering right amount of materials to the right places, some factors existing after major disasters distinguish the relief chain from the commercial supply chain fundamentally. These factors are 1) Urgency 2) Uncertainty 3) Complexity of operation conditions 4) Co-existence of various actors. Due to the existence of these challenging factors in disaster aftermath, the current practicing coordination mechanisms in the commercial supply chain can’t be transferred directly into the relief chain. As the application level for these coordination mechanisms are evaluated respectively in this thesis, it turns out Joint Procurement, Quick Response and 3rd party logistics are those promising mechanisms with a high level of application prospect in the relief chain. Meanwhile, the generic lessons from the commercial supply chain still hold in the relief chain and especially when they are put in practice operationally or tactically among organizations. The theoretical study provides the research a direction to further explore the reality. The Wenchuan earthquake case study is conducted to test the prospects of these coordination methods in Chinese context. Through this case study, all the specific promising coordination mechanisms are found with some changes adapted to specific situations. Some coordination initiatives that reflect the generic approaches (Resource Sharing) in commercial chain are also discovered i.e. demand information sharing and inventory capacity sharing. Meanwhile, some new coordination initiatives are invented uniquely by relief actors. They are coordination to have a complementary supply effect and coordination for the sake of legal operation. In order to better involve actors in the relief chain, the following recommendations are offered to humanitarian organizations during the preparation phase 1) Non-governmental can be incorporated into existing relief system to achieve an overall complemented effect to governmental relief 2) Build up sustainable relations with suppliers on emergency supply 3) NGOs Identify strategic alliance before emergency. During response phase, it is advisable for NGOs to 1) Spot their position in less attention areas to avoid media’s framing effect 2) Coordination by standing by when information is unclear.

In many consumer markets lead-time is no longer the outcome of a process of planning, producing and delivery. Many companies have gained competitive advantage through shortening the lead-time. In achieving this, next to the introduction of more flexibility in their own operations, companies are looking for more flexible suppliers. Traditionally uncertainty in supply was mitigated through high inventories. Next to the costs involved in keeping these inventories, they also delay the demand information and thereby create volatility, called the bullwhip effect. That is why various industries have put efforts in lowering the inventories and increasing flexibility. Introducing flexibility in production is rather controversial in the chemicals industry. Economies of scale and low margins nurture the emphasis on plant utilization. This drives ever lower margins, hence an even higher emphasis on plant utilization. The 24-hour operation leaves no flexibility to respond to a changing demand or to compensate for downtime. The company that initiated this research and offered the facilities to perform a desk study and provided the data to build a simulation model is active in the chemicals industry. During the recession of 2008 the company was confronted with a decrease in demand. In 2010 a quick recovery of the market was experienced, accompanied with several assets failing this caused large disruptions in the supply to customers. The reliability of supply was perceived too low at the commercial interface. This made the company look for ways to improve the customer-perceived value of supply. In this report a strategic audit is proposed. The objective of this audit is to align the company’s competitive strategy and operations strategy. The competitive strategy considers the market the company is active in and its value proposition to its customers. In this research this was done though the Industry Trends Analysis and the Customer Value Analysis. The market view was applied, which starts at the market and ends in recommendations for the operations. This audit structured the answering of the following research question: How can chemicals companies delivering to intermediate markets, improve the customer-perceived value of the supply in a cost-effective way? Increasing volatility in the demand on consumer markets makes that requirements of the industries downstream of the chemicals industry include the responsiveness to this volatile demand. As a consequence this also influences the customer-perceived value of the manufacturer’s supply. The commoditization in the downstream markets increases the need for agile operations and make that customers focus more on service-aspects like lead-times. Through a structured survey customers were asked to indicate the importance of, and performances on, supply chain related aspects. These aspects were based on the four guiding principles for supply chain managers: responsiveness, reliability, resilience and relationships and the three of the four elements of customer value: quality, service and timing (cost was excluded to prevent strategic answers). Besides a confirmation of some characteristics of the industry like the low importance of customized solutions and the high emphasis on quality the survey also resulted in new insights. The results especially represent the CASE customers, a segment in which the company wants to grow and where customers on average are smaller and deliver to industries where just-in-time practices are more common. In contrast with Flexibles customers these customers value responsiveness more than reliability. Reliability was valued high and performances where rated high. For responsiveness the importance was indicated to be high, while the performances where rated amongst the lowest. The challenge for the company will be to become less dependent on forecasts and increase the agility of operations while sustaining the current level of reliability. As part of the strategic audit, the competency gap was specified by defining key performance indicators that the company should improve. The objective of the system should be to limit the lead-times, achieve a high order fulfilment rate and keep appropriate inventory levels. The company currently applies a hybrid form of make-to-order (MTO) and make-to-stock (MTS) operations regime. The regime is based on forecasts that are facilitated by the monthly repeated S&OP process. The focus is in the first place on optimizing production, which leads to varying availability of products and a long planning horizon. The delay in information between the complex production chain and demand management makes that inventory levels vary a lot and consequentially order fulfilment is compromised. It is advised to implement the just-in-time (JIT) regime. This regime has the prospect of shorter lead-times, more stable inventory levels which lead to less variation in product availability and thereby increases order fulfilment. The only downside is that this compromises the production capacity used on short term as this is adaptive to the demand, which is counter intuitive regarding the current KPI’s which focus on the occupancy of assets. The prospect is that production capacity is only used for producing the right products at the right time and higher sales margins due to more stable operations. The production processes and assets were successfully represented in a simulation model, which delivered valuable insights for the industry. The chemicals industry is characterized by a bill of materials that decomposes a few raw materials into many finished products. This makes that the chemicals industry has one of the most complex production chains. In this thesis an object oriented representation of the system was proposed. The relations between objects describe the bill of materials, thereby enabling the simulation of the complex production chain. Experiments based on the sales of 2010 and disruptions based on historical data from 2005 to 2011 excluding the force-majeure situations showed that the JIT regime is successful in fulfilling the orders with short lead times and low inventory levels. It is important to note that the sales represent a managed demand. Due to the inflexible capacity this managed demand is considered an important requirement for the system to work. Next to an improved order fulfilment, the model showed that JIT allows lower inventory levels. Finally JIT makes the impact of disruptions more predictable, which enables the company to develop calculated responses to these situations.