A new location-inventory policy with reverse logistics applied to B2C e-markets of China [An article from: International Journal of Production Economics]

This digital document is a journal article from International Journal of Production Economics, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Based on the characteristics of consumer purchasing behavior over business-to-consumer (B2C) electronic markets in China, we consider a supply chain with one supplier, one B2C firm and multiple distribution centers (DCs) to jointly study supply chain location and inventory policies when product returns are allowed for. A new location-inventory policy is proposed and modeled as a bi-level programming problem: The upper level determines appropriate locations of third checking sites (3CS), and the lower level presents a coordinated inventory replenishment QS_R policy in light of the 3CS locations. An abstract network based on a B2C firm in China is adopted to illustrate the proposed model. We find that a QS_R policy is more effective on inventory control than the independent control policy is; 3CS added into the network improves the B2C firm's profit, and sensitivity analysis provides interesting managerial insights into the B2C firm's profit improvement in China.