With growing worldwide trade, container terminals have grown in number and size. Many new terminals are now automated to increase operational efficiency. The key focus is on improving seaside processes, where a distinction can be made between single quay crane operations (all quay cranes are...

In this article we focus on product return handling and warehousing issues. In some businesses return rates can be well over 20% and returns can be especially costly when not handled properly. In spite of this, many managers have handled returns extemporarily. The fact that quantitative methods...

Chinese entrepreneurs innovatively manage organisations in the absence of strong economic institutions, under conditions of high environmental and technological uncertainty. This paper presents the findings of an empirical study designed to investigate how Chinese entrepreneurs can be successful...

Factory Gate Pricing (FGP) is a relatively new phenomenon in retail distribution. Under FGP, products are no longer delivered at the retailer distribution center, but collected by the retailer at the factory gates of the suppliers. Owing to both the asymmetry in the distribution networks (the...

In this study we consider a pick-to-pack orderpicking system, in which batches of orders are picked simultaneously from different(work) zones by a group of order pickers. After picking, the orders are transported by a conveyor to the next station for packing. Our aim is to determine the optimal...

To address the problem why China, as a communist country, moves in the opposite direction when the public sector has undergoing a continuous growth in most Western economies since the World War I, we offer a new approach that the de facto fiscal decentralization curtails government size in...

The development of entrepreneurship and a private business sector in China pose various challenges to analysis. On the one hand, neo-classically based New Institutional Economics aims to find evidence that long-term investment and long-term commitment in and around firms can not be expected...

This paper is part of a broader research project that aims to analyse the emerging private business sector in China by focusing on three topics.

Already for a long time retailers take back products. In this paper we explore the factors contributing to the decision of combining vs. separating inbound and outbound flows during the return handling process. We do so through a comparative analysis of the operations in nine retailer...

We study the case of a catalogue/internet mail order retailer selling seasonal products and receiving large numbers of commercial returns. Returned products arriving before the end of the selling season can be resold if there is sufficient demand. A single order is placed before the season...