roduct recovery management (PRM) encompasses the management of all used and discarded products, components, and materials that fail under the responsibility of a manufacturing company. The objective of product recovery management is to recover as much of the economic (and ecological) value as reasonably possible, thereby reducing the ultimate quantities of waste.The traditional approach of many manufacturers towards used products has been to ignore them. Manufacturers typically did not feel responsible for what happened with their products after customer use. Most products were designed in such a way that while materials, assembly, and distribution costs were minimized, the repair, reuse, and disposal requirements were not talcen into account. Manufacturers generally believed that the costs of incorporating these requirements would outweigh the benefits. Most of their customers were not prepared to pay an additional fee for a "green" product. Most purchasing decisions were made with the intention of minimizing the purchasing costs, instead of optimizing life-cycle performance-which includes maintenance, reuse, and disposal issues. Consequently, the majority of used products in "developed countries" were landfilled or incinerated, with considerable damage to the environment. Today, both customers and authorities demand that manufacturers reduce the quantities of waste generated by their products. Customer pressure is triggered by environmental concern in general and by rising product disposal costs

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Purpose-By constantly working in environments with high degree of uncertainty, humanitarian organizations end up becoming specialists in the implementation of agile systems. Their counterparts in profit-making organizations have a lot to learn from them in this domain. Volatility of demand, imbalance between supply and demand and disruptions are all factors that affect commercial supply chains and call for a high level of agility. The aims of this paper are twofold: first, to clearly define the concept of supply chain agility, and second, to build a model for assessing the level of agility of a supply chain. Design/methodology/approach-Three approaches are used in this research: literature review, case study and symbolic modeling. Findings-The paper developed first, a framework for defining supply chain agility and second, a model for assessing and improving the capabilities of humanitarian and commercial supply chains in terms of agility, based on an analysis of humanitarian approaches. Research limitations/implications-The model has been developed thanks to inputs from humanitarian practitioners and feedbacks from academics. The practical application to various humanitarian relief operations and commercial supply chains is yet to be done. Originality/value-This paper contributes significantly to clarifying the notion of supply chain agility. It also provides a consistent, robust and reproducible method of assessing supply chain agility, which seems appropriate for both humanitarian and business sectors. Finally, it is complementary to existant research on humanitarian logistics. It shows that though humanitarian professionals have a lot to learn from the private sector, the reverse is also true.

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This essay and the following commentaries address the use of theory in operations management. While much is said about theory in the typical journal article, theory, as science defines it, is not at the center of much of our research. The discipline had fallen into some bad habits. This essay and its commentaries appeal for more attention to what theory can mean for our understanding of operations management.

This paper is on production planning and inventory control in systems where manufacturing and remanufacturing operations occur simultaneously. Typical for these hybridsystems is, that both the output of the manufacturing process and the output of the remanufacturing process can be used to fulfill customer demands. Here, we consider a relatively simple hybrid system, related to a single component durable product. For this system, we present a methodology to analyse a PUSH control strategy (in which all returned products are remanufactured as early as possible) and a PULL control strategy (in which all returned products are remanufactured as late as is convenient). The main contributions of this paper are (i) to compare traditional systems without remanufacturing to PUSH and to PULL controlled systems with remanufacturing, and (ii) to derive managerial insights into the inventory related effects of remanufacturing.production planning and inventory control, manufacturing, remanufacturing, statistical reorder point models, computational experiments

The identification, combination and interaction of the many factors which influence software development productivity makes the measurement, estimation, comparison and tracking of productivity rates very difficult. Through the analysis of a European Space Agency database consisting of 99 software development projects from 37 companies in 8 European countries, this paper seeks to provide significant and useful information about the major factors which influence the productivity of European space, military and industrial applications, as well as to determine the best metric for measuring the productivity of these projects. Several key findings emerge from the study. The results indicate that some organizations are obtaining significantly higher productivity than others. Some of this variation is due to the differences in the application category and programming language of projects in each company; however, some differences must also be due to the ways in which these companies manage their software development projects. The use of tools and modern programming practices were found to be major controllable factors in productivity improvement. Finally, the lines-of-code productivity metric is shown to be superior to the process productivity metric for projects in our database.

Purpose of this paperThis paper aims to contribute to a more complete understanding of logistics preparedness. By comparing research in preparedness and logistics with findings from empirical analysis of secondary data, we develop a definition of and framework for logistics preparedness, along with suggestions for a future research agenda. Design/methodology/approachWe link the way in which humanitarian organizations define and aim to achieve logistics preparedness with extant academic research. We critically analyze public data from 13 organizations that are active in disaster relief and review papers on logistics preparedness and humanitarian logistics. FindingsWe found that, despite the increased attention, there is no unified understanding across organizations about what constitutes logistics preparedness and how it can contribute to improvements in operations. Based on our review of the academic literature, we found the same is true for humanitarian logistics research. The lack of a common understanding has resulted in low visibility of efforts and lack of knowledge on logistics preparedness. Research limitations/implicationsBased on research and practice, we suggest a definition of and framework for logistics preparedness with related suggestions for future studies. Practical implications (if applicable)Findings can help the humanitarian community gain a better understanding of their efforts related to developing logistics preparedness and provide a better basis for communicating the need for, and results from, funding in preparedness. Societal implicationsResults can support improvements in humanitarian supply chains, thereby providing affected people with rapid, cost-efficient, and better-adapted responses. What is original/value of paperOur findings contribute to humanitarian logistics literature, firstly by identifying issues related to the lack of a common definition. Secondly, we extend the understanding of what constitutes logistics preparedness by proposing an operationalized framework and definition. Finally, we add to the literature by discussing what future topics and types of research may be required.