• Journal of Korea Port Economic Association
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.65-90
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• 2002

Despite the importance and necessity, the 3PL has not been activated to date. Among many views, customers claim that logistics service provider(LSP) are not prepared or capable of offering satisfactory 3PL services, while LSP emphasize the lack of mutual trust, closed corporate culture of the customer and excessive demand for reducing the costs. With this keeping in mind, it surveyed difference of perception between users and providers of 3PL services in terms of the actual status of using 3PL services, the degree of satisfaction and key factors for selecting 3PL provider through the questionnaire. As shown in this study, 43.3％ of the respondents outsourced logistics services. However, Most company outsourced only inland transportation (49.5％) which is a simple and limited scope of 3PL services, but it also indicated that the percentage of users have ranged was less then 10% in outsourcing their whole logistics sector to 3PL provider and employing other logistics functions. Among respondents, a majority of the service provider stated that they offered satisfactory cost-saving to the customers, while users felt that the degree of satisfaction for using 3PL services was evaluated as at an average level and they more highly regarded the strong partnership of their 3PL provider rather than the saving of cost and improvement of customer's services. Moreover, in contrast to the 3PL providers which regard the most important factor for selecting 3PL service provider is the logistics cost quoted, users of 3PL services felt that the quality of services was more significant than the reduction of cost, and this tendency for selecting 3PL providers was shown in more advanced countries. While users of 3PL services indicated that the main reason for not using 3PL services was to avoid disclosing information of their business and it costs much for employing 3PL providers than doing themselves, 3PL providers thought it was due to reluctancy of opening information and resistance from the logistics division engaged in logistics activities concerned. Accordingly, providers and users of 3PL services should trust each other and prepare plan to activate 3PL services under the collaborative relationships as soon as possible.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.163-179
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• 2010

Recentlythe concept of fast fashion is drawing attention as customer needs are diversified and supply lead time is getting shorter in fashion industry. It is emphasized as one of the critical success factors in the fashion industry how quickly and efficiently to satisfy the customer needs as the competition has intensified. Because the fast fashion is inherently susceptible to trend, it is very important for fashion retailers to make quick decisions regarding items to launch, quantity based on demand prediction, and the time to respond. Also the planning decisions must be executed through the business processes of procurement, production, and logistics in real time. In order to adapt to this trend, the fashion industry urgently needs supports from intelligent quick response(QR) system. However, the traditional functions of QR systems have not been able to completely satisfy such demands of the fast fashion industry. This paper proposes an intelligent quick response system for the fast fashion(IQRS-FF). Presented are models for QR process, QR principles and execution, and QR quantity and timing computation. IQRS-FF models support the decision makers by providing useful information with automated and rule-based algorithms. If the predefined conditions of a rule are satisfied, the actions defined in the rule are automatically taken or informed to the decision makers. In IQRS-FF, QRdecisions are made in two stages: pre-season and in-season. In pre-season, firstly master demand prediction is performed based on the macro level analysis such as local and global economy, fashion trends and competitors. The prediction proceeds to the master production and procurement planning. Checking availability and delivery of materials for production, decision makers must make reservations or request procurements. For the outsourcing materials, they must check the availability and capacity of partners. By the master plans, the performance of the QR during the in-season is greatly enhanced and the decision to select the QR items is made fully considering the availability of materials in warehouse as well as partners' capacity. During in-season, the decision makers must find the right time to QR as the actual sales occur in stores. Then they are to decide items to QRbased not only on the qualitative criteria such as opinions from sales persons but also on the quantitative criteria such as sales volume, the recent sales trend, inventory level, the remaining period, the forecast for the remaining period, and competitors' performance. To calculate QR quantity in IQRS-FF, two calculation methods are designed: QR Index based calculation and attribute similarity based calculation using demographic cluster. In the early period of a new season, the attribute similarity based QR amount calculation is better used because there are not enough historical sales data. By analyzing sales trends of the categories or items that have similar attributes, QR quantity can be computed. On the other hand, in case of having enough information to analyze the sales trends or forecasting, the QR Index based calculation method can be used. Having defined the models for decision making for QR, we design KPIs(Key Performance Indicators) to test the reliability of the models in critical decision makings: the difference of sales volumebetween QR items and non-QR items; the accuracy rate of QR the lead-time spent on QR decision-making. To verify the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed models, a case study has been performed for a representative fashion company which recently developed and launched the IQRS-FF. The case study shows that the average sales rateof QR items increased by 15%, the differences in sales rate between QR items and non-QR items increased by 10%, the QR accuracy was 70%, the lead time for QR dramatically decreased from 120 hours to 8 hours.