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This paper reports on a closed-loop supply chain network for the remanufacturing of products under RFID technology. RFID technology can be used in a closed-loop supply chain to improve the efficiency of ordering and the operation of a just-in-time remanufacturing system; however, this invariably incurs costs. Companies must carefully consider the opportunities and challenges posed by RFID technology to ensure that such an investment is worthwhile. This study contributes to the body of existing closed loop supply chain literature through formulating the problems as continuous functions to reduce the complexity of the problems and decrease the amount of data required which greatly facilitates development and implementation. The objective of this study was to determine the number of distribution centers, the number of remanufacturing centers, the joint replenishment cycle time, and the investment in RFID required to minimize total network costs. This paper applies a continuous approximation (CA) approach to model the network. Nonlinear programming techniques are developed to solve the optimization problems. The results of numerical analysis demonstrate that the adoption of RFID could be highly beneficial to companies. We also investigate the effects of parameter values on costs and decisions to gain managerial insight.

Recently, market globalization and competition have forced companies to find alternative means to boost sales and revenue. The use of the cash flow is increasingly becoming a viable alternative for managers to improve their company’s profitability in a supply chain. In today’s business transactions, a supplier usually asks a manufacturer to pay via the advance-cash-credit (ACC) payment scheme if the number of goods procured is high. Additionally, product perishability has been considered in an economic production quantity (EPQ) model since it is a real phenomenon. The present work develops an EPQ model for perishable products under the ACC payment scheme. The objective of the proposed model is to determine the optimal selling price and cycle time while maximizing profit under the ACC payment scheme using a discounted cash flow analysis. A nonlinear optimization algorithm is also proposed to solve the problem. In addition, some numerical examples are employed to illustrate the solution approach and show the concavity of the present value of the total annual profit in terms of both selling price and cycle time. The numerical results show that our proposal algorithm could be applied well to solve the problems. In addition, a sensitivity analysis is conducted to obtain some managerial insights. For example, if the impact of advance payment on procurement cost is relatively smaller than that of cash payment, then it is more profitable for the manufacturer to ask for a cash payment than to receive an advance payment and vice versa.

Deteriorating items, trade credit, and partial backordering are common in today’s business. However, no previous study on supply chain network design has considered these business aspects together. In this paper, we present supply chain networks designed for deteriorating items under trade credit and two conditions: (a) no shortage and (b) partial backordering of goods. We also present 2 algorithms based on nonlinear optimization that were developed in order to optimize the influence area and the joint replenishment-cycle time in the no-shortage case, and to identify the optimal shortage level in the partial-backordering case. The numerical examples presented herein illustrate how the solution procedure works. The effects of various values of the tested parameters on decisions and costs are also discussed. Our results could be used as a reference by managers when making business decisions.