【文章內容簡介】
e, an indepth understanding of the tradeoffs between operational and financial measurements and parameters, is of substantial importance. In this paper we bine the financial and operational aspects in a unified mathematical model to address the following research questions: How do working capital targets affect the optimal ordering policy and the relationship between product flows and cash flows? What is the impact of upstream and downstream payment delays on operational and financial performance? What are the tradeoffs between financial and operational measurements? This paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we review relevant literature on this subject. In Section 3, we provide a detailed description of our mathematical model, characterize the optimal ordering policy and quantify the working capital restrictions of our model. In Section 4, we discuss the managerial implications of our analysis in detail and provide numerical examples which highlight the previous findings. In Section 5, we summarize our key findings. Mathematical references and derivations are included in the Appendix A. 4. Managerial insights In this section we present the numerical results and discuss managerial insights on the effects of working capital constraints based on our modeling framework. In Section , we investigate the effect of working capital restrictions and payment delays. More precisely in Section we debate the characteristics of the optimal ordering policy. In Section we investigate the impact of working capital restrictions in cash flows and product flows. In Section we examine the effect of upstream and downstream payment terms on cash flows, product flows and working capital target levels. In Section we study the interdependencies between various financial and operational performance measurements and debate the consequences of disjoint performance target setting. Finally, in Section we examine a wider range of model parameters. Throughout this section, we illustrate our results with numerical examples. Even thought we use the aforementioned four cases, we base our analysis on the actual cash inflows and cash outflows. The ordering decisions depend on the expected working capital when the payment for the orders is due. Th