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...

Inventory policies for joint remanufacturing and manufacturing have recently received much attention. Most efforts, though, were related to (optimal) policy structures and numerical optimization, rather than closed form expressions for calculating near optimal policy parameters. The focus of...

While the net present value (NPV) approach is widely accepted as the right framework for studying production and inventory control systems, average cost (AC) models are more widely used. For the well known EOQ model it can be verified that (under certain conditions) the AC approach gives near...

We describe hybrid manufacturing/remanufacturing systems with a long lead time for manufacturing and a short lead time for remanufacturing. We review the classes of inventory strategies for hybrid systems in the literature. These are all based on equal lead times. For systems with slow...

We explore the value of information in the context of a remanufacturer that faces uncertainty with respect to demand, product return, and product recovery (yield loss). We assume a single period model in which the operational decision of interest is the quantity of new product to order. Our...

In forecasting and inventory control textbooks and software applications, the variance of the cumulative lead-time forecast error is, almost invariably, taken as the sum of the error variances of the individual forecast intervals. For stationary demand and a constant lead time, this implies...