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In recent times, sustainability has become more important for businesses. Accordingly, product remanufacturing has emerged as an interesting topic, as it is generally considered as a profitable and environmentally friendly end-of-use management option for several products. While extant literature on remanufacturing has comprehensively studied the topic of outsourcing, it has failed to recognize that retailers also have the flexibility to engage in remanufacturing. However, in recent years, several brand name retailers have established remanufacturing operations. The following question arises: Should original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) outsource their remanufacturing operations to their retailers? To answer this question, two models are developed in which an OEM interacts with an independent retailer on remanufacturing operations with the option to either remanufacture all products in-house (Model M) or outsource remanufacturing to their retailer (Model R). The result shows that although model M potentially facilitates greater economic, social, and environmental sustainability, it has costs for the retailer. Finally, a revenue-sharing contract is proposed to achieve a “win-win-win” outcome that has economic, social, and environmental benefits for all parties.

During the 1990s mature industries, such as car manufacturing, restructured their production and innovation processes, changing from vertical integration to high outsourcing. Open innovation is antithetic to vertical integration. Analyzing whether this restructuring influenced the emergence of open innovation is an important step towards improving our understanding of open innovation (Chesbrough and Crowther, 2006).

During the 1990s, Fiat, one the largest European car producers, increased the extent to which it involved external firms in new product development (NPD). Unlike its competitors, Fiat outsourced the NPD of core products, resembling the opening of innovation that "radical innovators" implement in high technology industry (Laursen and Salter, 2006, 137). However, it failed to transition towards open innovation because its "opening" to external firms also entailed downsizing in-house NPD divisions, which caused a "hollowing out" of its knowledge (Becker and Zirpoli, 2003). The products developed through this system did not perform well. After a dramatic decline in market shares, Fiat changed its NPD system: it reduced outsourcing of NPD, whilst opening it to customers for the first time. This contributed to the development of highly successful models, which fuelled Fiat's recovery after 2004.

The paper explains the Fiat case by looking at the drivers of its organizational changes from a historical perspective. It argues that Fiat's cost-cutting routines, developed because of its intangible specialization in small vehicles, explain why it opened NPD to suppliers but failed to adopt open innovation. The case study is relevant for the study of open innovation because it provides evidence of the relationships between outsourcing and open of innovation in a mature industry that went through a profound process of restructuring during the 1990s.

In this paper from the Xiangshang Forum 2006, we propose the Wisdom project, an international network initiative on developing the next generation of management and entrepreneurial systems based on knowledge and wisdom rather than data and information. This is a major challenge especially for China which must aspire to become wise and ethical rather than just efficient or effective. Major topics of the project include knowledge management, wisdom systems, added value measures, entrepreneurial university, and management as a profession. These topics are the key ones for developing sustainable competitive advantage of any globally aspiring economy or enterprise.

In this paper, a new mathematical model is presented for a cellular manufacturing system into tactical planning of a closed-loop supply chain to build a sustainable manufacturing enterprise. On the manufacturing side of the model, a comprehensive cellular manufacturing system is designed considering dynamic cell configuration, alternative process routings, lot splitting, sequence of operations, multiple units of identical machines, machine capacity, machine adjacency requirements, and cell size limits. On the closed-loop supply chain side of the model, different activities are considered including acquiring returned products, setting up the system for the implementation of disassembly operations, inventory holding of the returned products, remanufacturing the parts having high quality, and disposing of the returned products that cannot be economically recovered. The mathematical model in this paper, to the best of our knowledge, is the first model reducing the total costs of the cellular manufacturing system while considering the alternative process routings and subcontracting of the part demands. A detailed economic analysis is done on the large-sized example problem of the mathematical model to investigate the impacts of adopting different production policies such as internal production, inventory holding, and subcontracting as well as different manufacturing attributes such as dynamic reconfiguration and alternative process routings. The mathematical model is also solved for different instances to investigate the effects of incorporating subcontracting, alternative process routings, and dynamic reconfigurations in the model. Sensitivity analyses are also conducted to investigate the effects of the recovery rate of returned products on the objective function value and the number of returned products to be acquired. The effect of taking alternative process routings into consideration on the objective function value is also investigated.

Make-or-buy decisions on technology-intensive components represent a key task in the management of technologies. Against this background, this paper presents an analysis of a technology company which gave key insights into their make-or-buy decisions on the strategic and operative level. The results show two kinds of make-or-buy decisions, called type 1 and type 2. In contrast to type 1 make-or-buy decisions whose scope is mostly limited to the production and quality function, type 2 decisions are strongly linked to engineering and R&D activities. Moreover, two new decision matrices are introduced: a ‘product/subsystem aggregation’ scheme and a ‘make-or-buy controlling’ matrix. In an environment in which companies move towards greater use of outsourcing, the framework ensures that company strategy and core competencies are followed in the long run despite short-range deviations of make-or-buy analysis results. These findings might be helpful and suitable to other manufacturing companies that deal with technology-intensive components on a strategic and operative level.

Globalization has its detractors as well as supporters. Concerns have been expressed about the greater ease of fragmenting the production process so that more parts can be outsourced to a variety of countries. Highly developed regions worry about the possibility of greater unemployment or lower unskilled wage rates. Less developed regions are concerned that they may not possess a comparative advantage in the service link activities that promote fragmentation. The paper discusses these issues, with special emphasis on India and China.

The practice of solely relying on the human resources department in the selection process of external training providers has cast doubts and mistrust across other departments as to how trainers are sourced. There are no measurable criteria used by human resource personnel, since most decisions are based on intuitive experience and subjective market knowledge. The present problem focuses on outsourcing of private training programs that are partly government funded, which has been facing accountability challenges. Due to the unavailability of a scientific decision-making approach in this context, a 12-step algorithm is proposed and tested in a Japanese multinational company. The model allows the decision makers to revise their criteria expectations, in turn witnessing the change of the training providers' quota distribution. Finally, this multi-objective sensitivity analysis provides a forward-looking approach to training needs planning and aids decision makers in their sourcing strategy.

Government support for partnering between BioPharma companies and universities is growing in the UK and some European countries but few studies have explored these partnerships.

Through interviews and a survey of key institutions we explored perceptions of key informants on industry and university partnerships. Study participants identified that partnering helped them to increase innovation in R&D and led them to adopt more open approaches to innovation.

Organisational structures to coordinate and support partnerships; flexibility in operational management to solve problems in establishing and running these partnerships; leadership, especially by investigators to champion and lead collaborations; developing organisational capabilities of universities; and creation of an enabling environment by governments were identified as the critical success factors for partnering. The challenges faced were identified as lack of funding for university research teams; pressure on pricing from industry partners; disagreements on IP ownership; asymmetry of industry and university capabilities in partnering; and lack of administrative support with excessive bureaucracy from universities.

The purpose of this research is to determine the effect of logistics management and electronic data interchange (EDI) in enhancing competitive advantage. A total of 100 questionnaires were distributed to senior managers, middle-level managers and junior- level managers and 76 were filled and returned (76% response rate). The study adopted a quantitative method through simple and multiple linear regression analysis and qualitative descriptive method through analysis of variance (ANOVA). The results of this study found that logistics management dimensions such as transport management, physical distribution management, inventory management and warehousing management have a significant positive effect on competitive advantage. As for EDI, it is found that two out of the three dimensions such as better communication, and improved billing have a significant positive effect on competitive advantage. While quick access to information was found to have a significant negative effect on competitive advantage. The results further revealed that logistics management has a significant positive effect on competitive advantage.

We consider m-machine permutation flow shop problems with an outsourcing option for a special case where each job's processing time equals the job's processing requirement plus a characteristic value of the machine. The objective is to minimize the sum of the performance measure for in-house jobs (the total completion time or the makespan) and the total outsourcing cost. We prove that two problems are polynomially solvable when the number of machines is fixed.

In this paper, we address a supply chain scheduling model with outsourcing and transportation. A job can be scheduled either on a single machine at a manufacturer’s plant or outsourced to a subcontractor. We assume that there are a sufficient number of vehicles at the manufacturer and the subcontractor such that each completed job can be transported to its customer immediately. For a given set of jobs, the decisions we need to make include the selection of jobs to be outsourced and the schedule of all the jobs. When the objective functions are to minimize the weighted sum of common scheduling measures and the total cost, we present their complexity analysis and a $2$-approximation algorithm for the second problem.

As a result of IT outsourcing and offshoring, IT professionals and educators are faced with the following question: What SE & KE skill sets will make a software engineer or a knowledge engineer immune to the impact of outsourcing and offshoring? This article summarizes the position papers from a panel held during the 2006 International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering from July 5 to 7 at the Hotel Sofitel, Redwood City in California, USA. Bringing software and knowledge engineers closer to the needs of their prospective customers and providing more value than simply pure software development and maintenance, is an open challenge at least for traditional computer science and software engineering curricula.

This paper extends a previous study that proposed an integrated model to test knowledge sharing (KS) motivation among information technology (IT) workers. While the previous study focussed on the differences in KS between internal and external IT workers, the perspective of the current paper is broader; it proposes additional hypotheses, and uses both inferential statistics and data mining techniques to detect further practical aspects of the integrated model findings. Because data mining techniques are useful in extracting patterns and gaining insights from data, they are implemented here alongside inferential statistics. The present study also looks into the employment-contract factor, to better capture the differences between internal and external IT workers. The study reveals that external workers score significantly lower than internal workers in almost every component of the integrated KS model. This gives rise to five practical implications of knowledge management (KM) and employment policies, including factors and practises that should be taken into consideration while employing external workers, to help motivate collaborative behaviour in IT departments.

This paper draws from the findings of a large-scale empirical research program on the global application service provider (ASP) industry funded by research grants from the European Commission (EC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). A conceptual framework consisting of a taxonomy of ASPs is used to demonstrate the different market segmentation strategies adopted by ASPs for competing in this fledgling and turbulent industry. Drawing from empirical research carried out in the US and Europe, the paper evaluates ASP strategies for deploying, hosting, managing and enabling software applications on behalf of their customers. The ASP business model is advocated as an attractive value proposition for SMEs, dot.com companies and other start-up firms seeking hyper-growth. Yet the evidence so far suggests a slow start to the ASP market as few reference sites demonstrating best practice exist. ASPs will therefore need to re-evaluate their strategies if they are to convince potential customers of the benefits of application outsourcing. Against this background, the paper evaluates the benefits and risks of the ASP model.

This paper explores the relationship between innovation outcomes, absorptive capacity and human resource management practices in information technology outsourcing relationships. Previous research has highlighted the need for absorptive capacity to achieve innovation in organizations. Since this absorptive capacity is likely to be embodied within the relationship management teams of both the supplier and client in outsourcing dyads, the human resource practices of the participating firms should have a direct bearing on levels of absorptive capacity and innovation outcomes for the relationships. This research examined four large IT relationships as case studies and presents a model of inter-organizational innovation that shows the necessity of developing the appropriate absorptive capacity to achieve innovation in outsourcing environments. From this model, the research presents three HRM practices that can help develop absorptive capacity to support innovation activities: retention of client employees with firm-specific business process knowledge rather than technical knowledge; minimization of legacy hiring practices for suppliers; and maintaining and optimal work group size for relationship management teams on both the client and supplier sides of the relationship.

With lower operational costs, many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) trade via e-commerce, but without the abilities to develop the expensive payment system. Therefore, a cash flow service provider plays critical roles to complete the online transactions. A cash flow service provider must precisely predict those outsourcing customers to serve the customers well under the correctly prepared facilities. Since the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference systems (ANFIS) have demonstrated prediction efficiency for fuzzy circumstances in many fields, this study attempts to innovate deploying the ANFIS model on the time series predictions for e-commerce cash flow service customers. Moreover, this study takes an e-commerce cash flow service provider in Taiwan for numerical analysis. For the ANFIS predictions, an acceptable prediction error rate of 5.6% is achieved. The results show that fashion industry tops the highest customers share for outsourcing the cash flow services; and the credit cards top the highest share in the payment media choices.

This paper examines various economic issues on offshoring (international outsourcing). It begins with a discussion of the factors that determine a firm's decision to offshore and illustrates, with simple models, the cost saving of offshoring certain stages of production and the advantages of specializing in some input production and engaging in input trade. The paper then examines the recent trend in offshoring with special emphases on the rise of IT offshoring and the characteristics of firms engaging in offshoring and exporting. The effect of offshoring and national welfare is then discussed in light of numerous results in recent empirical studies. Finally, after examining the current US programs to aid the displaced workers, the paper discusses various short-run and long-run policy proposals to alleviate the negative impacts of offshoring.

This paper examines the effects of “fragmentation,” defined as the splitting of a production process into two or more steps that can be undertaken in different locations but that lead to the same final product. Introducing the possibility of fragmentation into simple theoretical models of international trade, the paper finds the effects of fragmentation on national welfare, on patterns of specialization and trade, and on factor prices. Models examined include the Ricardian Model and the Heckscher-Ohlin Model, both for small open economies and for a two-country world. Results are as follows: 1. If fragmentation does not change the prices of goods, then it must increase the value of output of any country where it occurs and that of the world. 2. If fragmentation does change prices, then fragmentation can lower the welfare of a country by turning its terms of trade against it. 3. Even in a country that gains from fragmentation, it is possible (but not necessary) that some factor owners within that country will lose. 4. To the extent that factor prices are not equalized internationally in the absence of fragmentation, fragmentation may be a force toward factor price equalization. © 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.