Supply chain and corporate environmental management

This volume contains a collection of papers in the field of Supply Chain and Corporate Environmental Management in honor of Professor Dr. Dr. h. c. Knut Richter, one of the leading scholars in this area. Contributed by distinguished academics, the volume chapters deal with a broad variety of topics, including Reverse Logistics, Operations Management, Inventory Management, and Mobile Technologies. The efficient management of material, information and financial flows not only within an individual company but across the entire supply chain (from suppliers to manufacturers to wholesalers to retailers through to the final customers) to improve its competitiveness and to gain a sustainable competitive advantage in today's global markets is at the heart of Supply Chain Management. Supply Chain Management has been increasingly gaining interest from practitioners as well as academics in the last two decades, and the interest continues to grow. The questions discussed in this Festschrift are computer-aided process planning in adaptive supply chains, new product development scheduling, integrated process planning and scheduling for job-shop manufacturing, benefits of mobile communication in pre-sell distribution, supply chain coordination, capacitated lot size problems with minimum order quantity, controlling multi-location inventory systems with lateral transshipments, and sharing the benefits of efficiency increase in a supply chain. Corporate Environmental Management is another highly topical area. Against the background of limited natural resources and limited natural assimilation capacities, the problem of product recovery has been attracting an ever-increasing interest in the last years. Professor Knut Richter was one of the first scholars ever who combined these two fields of Supply Chain and Corporate Environmental Management, dealing with inventory management decisions in systems with remanufacturing. While many of strategic and tactical reverse logistics problems remain unsolved by now, several chapters in this volume contribute to closing this gap, considering reverse logistics in extended MRP theory, lot sizing problems in systems with remanufacturing and quality corrective interruptions and improvements, and the policy structure for a stochastic product recovery problem with remanufacturing and procurement lead times.