Reverse logistics, a fairly new concept in logistics, has gained increasing importance as a profitable and sustainable business strategy. I describe a holistic view of reverse logistics and distill 11 insights for successful implementation of reverse logistics from the existing literature and published case studies. The strategic factors consist of strategic costs, overall quality, customer service, environmental concerns, and legislative concerns. The operational factors consist of cost-benefit analysis, transportation, warehousing, supply management, remanufacturing and recycling, and packaging. Insights about these factors together form the state-of-the-art knowledge about the keys to successful design and use of reverse-logistics systems.
Manufacturing companies are facing rapid and unanticipated changes in their business environment. Agile manufacturing (AM) is a manufacturing paradigm that focuses on smaller scale, modular production facilities, and agile operations capable of dealing with turbulent and changing environments. From several enablers of AM, virtual enterprise (VE) and information technology (IT) were chosen. This empirical study explored the impact of the alignment between VE and IT on business performance in an AM setting. Extensive data collection strategy and several tests are used to establish the reliability and validity of the data collected. Extensive analyses of the data using structural equation molding were performed for five hypotheses. The results indicate that both VE and IT had positive influences on business performance. It was also established that the alignment between VE and IT had a positive impact on business performance. Further, it was shown that the impact of the alignment between VE and IT on business performance was more significant than the impact of VE and IT on business performance individually. In conclusion, the assessment of the results along with future research directions is provided. #
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