Sustainable supply chain management and the transition towards a circular economy: Evidence and some applications

In the last decades, green and sustainable supply chain management practices have been developed, trying to integrate environmental concerns into organisations by reducing unintended negative consequences on the environment of production and consumption processes. In parallel to this, the circular economy discourse has been propagated in the industrial ecology literature and practice. Circular economy pushes the frontiers of environmental sustainability by emphasising the idea of transforming products in such a way that there are workable relationships between ecological systems and economic growth. Therefore, circular economy is not just concerned with the reduction of the use of the environment as a sink for residuals but rather with the creation of self-sustaining production systems in which materials are used over and over again.Through two case studies from different process industries (chemical and food), this paper compares the performances of traditional and circular production systems across a range of indicators. Direct, indirect and total lifecycle emissions, waste recovered, virgin resources use, as well as carbon maps (which provide a holistic visibility of the entire supply chain) are presented. The paper asserts that an integration of circular economy principles within sustainable supply chain management can provide clear advantages from an environmental point view. Emerging supply chain management challenges and market dynamics are also highlighted and discussed.     

Decision model for product rollover in manufacturing operations

The purpose of this study is to investigate critical decisions when planning for product rollover at a manufacturing company, and how to organise these decisions. A literature review and a case study are used to develop a decision model. The findings indicate that product rollover can be organised in a five-phase decision model. The research quality is strengthened by a structured literature review, but it can be argued that more empirical research is needed for validation. For researchers, this paper contributes with the identification of critical decisions and a model for product rollover. For practitioners, the study highlights the need to acknowledge the importance of product rollover and its role as a competitive weapon. In earlier studies, product rollover has mainly been investigated from a market perspective, so that this study contributes by investigating the issue from a manufacturing perspective.     

Estimating function method for product autoregressive models

The first-order product autoregressive (PAR(1)) model introduced by McKenzie in 1982 McKenzie, E. D. (1982). Product autoregression: A time series characterization of the gamma distribution. Journal of Applied Probability 19:463–468. [Google Scholar] did not attract the attention of practitioners due to the unavailability of a proper estimation method. This article proposes an estimating function (EF) method to fill the gap. In particular, we suggest an optimal combination of linear and quadratic EFs to overcome the problem of parameter identification. The procedure is applied to Weibull and Gamma PAR(1) models. Simulation and data analysis show that the proposed method performs better than the existing methods.     

产品机会缺口分析

产品机会缺口分析作为新产品开发中研究用户需求的一种方式,它所要扮演的角色是在社会新趋势下发现现有产品的不足和产品使用者的潜在需求,从中找出产品的创新、改进空间,并以此来引导新产品的开发。社会趋势发生改变,用户对产品的评价标准会有所不同,产品角色也会发生相应的转变。当现有产品所能满足的与用户的新需求之间出现空缺时,就会出现产品的机会缺口。文章通过当前产品的情感价值需求这个机会缺口的分析来说明之。     

USING CONJOINT ANALYSIS TO PREDICT TRIAL AND REPEAT-PURCHASE PATTERNS OF NEW FREQUENTLY PURCHASED PRODUCTS*

A new approach is proposed to evaluate new-product opportunities. This approach uses the distribution of brand-purchase probability of the new product over a population of potential customers and the outputs from conjoint analysis. The heterogeneous distribution of brand-purchase probability is expressed by a beta binomial brand-choice model compounded with a negative binomial product-class purchase-incidence model. The resulting model provides a way to predict trial and repeat-purchase patterns of new-product concepts. The paper discusses the development of the model. It also discusses issues of measurement, estimation, testing, and implementation of the proposed approach based on actual empirical data.     

纺织品进口配额的取消与中国面临挑战的思考

面对2005年纺织品进口配额的取消,WTO成员各有思考,无论是处于成本相对劣势的发达国家,还是处于技术相对落后的发展中国家,对中国纺织品的出口潜力都特别忧虑。实际上,中国的出口环境远不像人们想象的那样,只要配额取消就可以长驱直入各国市场,因为各国对自己市场的保护措施是多方面的。中国要转变出口追求标准,即从单纯的追求创汇总额向追求出口利润或净利益转变。为此,在对外贸易政策方面要追求企业和国家高效益,采取战略性贸易政策,有效地组织产品生产,形成本国企业对特定产品市场的垄断,以便靠价格控制,而不是数量激增获得最大限度的出口收益。     

产品市场竞争程度对企业融资行为的影响

许多研究表明我国上市公司存在较强的股权融资偏好。国内学者根据代理理论认为股权融资过多的企业未能充分利用财务杠杆而使企业绩效下降,而本文主要从产品市场竞争对资本结构影响这一角度来研究上市公司的融资行为。研究发现,上市公司的股权融资偏好和上市公司治理结构不完善、代理问题严重等体制和政策因素有关,但是,激烈的产品市场竞争也是导致企业采用低财务杠杆的重要原因,而且由于这一原因而导致的财务保守行为是合理的,它是企业为避免财务风险提高产品市场竞争能力而采取的战略行为。     

Visualizing the factory through meta- manufacturing processes

Milestone or deadline driven production management is predominant in most manufacturing companies. Problems and other disturbing occurrences tend to see their first daylight during phases where plans are implemented into reality, for example, when production commences, prototypes enter manufacturing and deliveries are expected. Conventional control routines fail to depict the true progress and procedures of the company on an on-line basis, which means that instead of being proactive they serve as means to react to already existing problems. This paper studies the application of advanced visualization techniques to the already existing information embedded in a comany's information infrastructure, and how it can help management to anticipate probable near future pitfalls. By studying those daily operations of a company which share a document relationship with the true manufacturing process, that is, the meta-manufacturing processes, a completely new perspective on the company's value-adding activities is drawn. By mining the existing data reservoirs of a company traditionally difficult management processes, such as product development, vendor integration, production planning, can be analysed and the problems identified in a novel way to react in advance. The paper displays several empirical examples from bulk to one-of-a-kind production where the method has been successfully implemented.     

Order statistics from the linear-exponential distribution,part I: increasing hazard rate case

For the linear-exponential distribution with increasing hazard rate, exact and explicit expressions for means, product moments and percentage points of order statistics are obtained. Some recurrence relations for both single and product moments of order statistics are also derived. These recurrence relations would enable one to obtain all the higher order moments of order statistics for all sample sizes from those of the lower order     

再制造方式下引擎保证成本最小化研究

针对如何优化汽车引擎产品的保证成本这一问题,利用成本动因理论,分析并建立了引擎产品保证成本动因体系,该成本动因体系不仅包括了传统的保证成本,还考虑了失效产品再次失效的潜在成本。接着,利用数学规划方法,建立了引擎产品保证成本模型,并利用Matlab进行了数值分析。研究结论可用于指导汽车引擎制造企业在再制造方式下优化引擎产品保证成本。