Title: Integrated supply chain management challenges in industry

Authors: Nicolas Zufferey; Olivier Gallay; Reinhard Buergy; Oleksandr Velykoivanenko

Addresses: Geneva School of Economics and Management, GSEM – University of Geneva, Uni-Mail, 1211 Geneva 4, Switzerland ' Department of Operations, Faculty of Business and Economics (HEC Lausanne), University of Lausanne, Quartier UNIL-Chamberonne, CH-1015, Lausanne, Switzerland ' School of Computer Science and Information Technology, Applied University of Lucerne, Suurstoffi 1, CH-6343 Rotkreuz, Switzerland ' Algovos Consulting Sàrl, Chemin du Gué 63C, 1213 Petit-Lancy, Switzerland

Abstract: A supply chain is usually made of various levels in the following sequence: suppliers, plants, warehouses, and shops. Each level has often its own decision makers, constraints to satisfy, and objective functions to optimise. Often, all these decision makers have limited information and optimise local levels on their own, which can result in large supply chain variations. In contrast, in the case of integrated logistics, fewer decisions makers having more information and more decisional power are likely to optimise larger portions of the supply chain. This can result in worse solutions for each supply-chain level but in better solutions when considering the entire supply chain. In this paper, in addition to highlighting the importance of capacity management, we present the benefits of integrated management approaches relying on three industrial applications belonging to different fields (namely, production scheduling, cross docking, and global supply chain management). Integrated logistics challenges are also identified.

Keywords: integrated optimisation; capacity management; production scheduling; cross docking; supply chain management.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLSM.2026.151753

International Journal of Logistics Systems and Management, 2026 Vol.53 No.2, pp.215 - 242

Received: 28 Mar 2023
Accepted: 15 Aug 2023
Published online: 18 Feb 2026 *

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