Periodic Review, Push Inventory Policies for Remanufacturing

Sustainability has become a major issue in most economies, causing many leading companies to focus on product recovery and reverse logistics. This research is focused on product recovery, and in particular on production control and inventory management in the remanufacturing context. We study a remanufacturing facility that receives a stream of returned products according to a Poisson process. Demand is uncertain and also follows a Poisson process. The decision problems for the remanufacturing facility are when to release returned products to the remanufacturing line and how many new products to manufacture. We assume that remanufactured products are as good as new. In this paper, we employ a "push" policy that combines these two decisions. It is well known that the optimal policy parameters are difficult to find analytically; therefore, we develop several heuristics based on traditional inventory models. We also investigate the performance of the system as a function of return rates, backorder costs and manufacturing and remanufacturing lead times; and we develop approximate lower and upper bounds on the optimal solution. We illustrate and explain some counter-intuitive results and we test the performance of the heuristics on a set of sample problems. We find that the average error of the heuristics is quite low

A Dynamic Pricing Model for Coordinated Sales and Operations

Recent years have seen advances in research and management practice in the area of pricing, and particularly in dynamic pricing and revenue management. At the same time, researchers and managers have made dramatic improvements in operations and supply chain management. The interactions between pricing and operations/supply chain performance, however, are not as well understood. In this paper, we examine this linkage by developing a deterministic, finite-horizon dynamic programming model that captures a price/demand effect as well as a stockpiling/consumption effect – price and market stockpile influence demand, demand influences consumption, and consumption influences the market stockpile. The decision variable is the unit sales price in each period. Through the market stockpile, pricing decisions in a given period explicitly depend on decisions in prior periods. Traditional operations models typically assume exogenous demand, thereby ignoring some of the market dynamics. Herein, we model endogenous demand, and we develop analytical insights into the nature of optimal prices and promotions. We develop conditions under which the optimal prices converge to a constant. In other words, price promotion is suboptimal. We also analytically and numerically illustrate cases where the optimal prices vary over time. In particular, we show that price dynamics may be driven by both (a) revenue effects, due to nonlinear market responses to prices and/or inventory, and (b) cost effects, due to economies of scale in operations. The paper concludes with a discussion of directions for future research

Smart Pricing: Linking Pricing Decisions with Operational Insights

The past decade has seen a virtual explosion of information about customers and their preferences. This information potentially allows companies to increase their revenues, in particular since modern technology enables price changes to be effected at minimal cost. At the same time, companies have taken major strides in understanding and managing the dynamics of the supply chain, both their internal operations and their relationships with supply chain partners. These two developments are narrowly intertwined. Pricing decisions have a direct effect on operations and visa versa. Yet, the systematic integration of operational and marketing insights is in an emerging stage, both in academia and in business practice. This article reviews a number of key linkages between pricing and operations. In particular, it highlights different drivers for dynamic pricing strategies. Through the discussion of key references and related software developments we aim to provide a snapshot into a rich and evolving field