What do you look for when you buy a pair of jeans? Color? Cut? Designer label? Price tag? One thing is certain: Even if you buy what you think is the same make/label/origin, year after year, it is an entirely different item with a brand-new geographic story.

A small but growing number of U.S. hospitals are using a version of quid pro quo to achieve two crucial goals: lock in the "rainmaker" physicians — the ones who are at the top of their specializations — and secure the best deal from suppliers.

If, as healthcare experts say, supplies gobble up 30 percent of a typical American hospital's annual budget, then upgrading the medical supplies system is a sensible investment.

Americans concerned with the growing proportion of GDP devoted to healthcare would do well to consider the industry's supply chain. Soon the cost of drugs and medical supplies will equal the cost of labor and benefits in the U.S.

Congress and President Bush appear to be on a collision course over U.S.-Mexico trucking, but most likely trucks will continue to traverse the border, fostering the flow of international commerce, according to Arnold Maltz, a professor of supply chain management at the W. P. Carey Schoo

Detailed metrics not only help purchasing departments measure and analyze performance — they provide data that can spur organizational and procedural changes and help companies proactively prepare for the unexpected.

In September, the U.S. and Mexican governments took a tentative first step towards the final goal of allowing unfettered shipping between the two nations — a measure agreed upon under NAFTA but delayed since 1995.

The explosion of data can be traced to traditional internet sources, plus social media and new devices like smart phones, GPS, and tablets, but this expansion is equally apparent in everything from manufacturing to retail to health care. In this environment, being able to comm

Uncertainty is the enemy of the supply chain, and unfortunately that enemy is a constant companion of companies that maintain complex, extended, global supply chains. One factor in that uncertainty is the irregular nature of border-crossing delays, which W.P.

The annual research dissemination conference of the W. P. Carey School’s Health Sector Supply Chain Research Consortium is designed to bring practitioners and researchers together to talk about new knowledge and practical issue. The journals edited at the W. P.