Schering spends considerable effort to undertake product recovery activities in pharmaceutical production. The two main recovery activities are by-product recycling and solvent reuse. The main driver for engaging in these activities is economical. Recovery leads to annual savings of...

We address the dynamic lot sizing problem for systems with product returns. The demand and return amounts are deterministic over the finite planning horizon. Demands can be satisfied by manufactured/procured new items, but also by remanufactured returned items. The objective is to determine...

We consider a joint manufacturing / remanufacturing environment with remanufacturing yield loss. Demand and return follow independent stationary Poisson processes. Returns can be disposed off upon arrival to the system. Manufacturing and remanufacturing operations performed in the same facility...

Khouja and Park (Omega 31, 539-545, 2003) analyze the problem of optimizing the lot size under continuous price decrease. They show that the classic EOQ formula can lead to far from optimal solutions and develop an alternative lot size formula using the software package Mathematica. This formula...

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...

Control of spare parts is very difficult as demands can be very low (once in a few years is no exception), while the consequences of a stockout can be severe. While in the past many companies choose to have very large spares inventories, one now observe trends in areas with good transportation...

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...

We propose a new method for determining order-up-to levels for intermittent demand items in a periodic review system. Contrary to existing methods, we exploit the intermittent character of demand by modelling lead time demand as a compound binomial process. In an extensive numerical study using...

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...