A Predictive Maintenance System for Reverse Supply Chain Operations

Background: Reverse supply chains of machinery and equipment face significant challenges, and overcoming them is critical for effective customer service and sustainable operation. Maintenance and repair services, strongly associated with the reverse movement of equipment, are among the most demanding reverse supply chain operations. Equipment is scattered in various locations, and multiple suppliers are involved in its maintenance, making it challenging to manage the related reverse supply chain operations. Effective maintenance is essential for businesses-owners of the equipment, as reducing costs while improving service quality helps them gain a competitive advantage. Methods: To enhance reverse supply chain operations related to equipment maintenance, this paper presents the operational framework, the methodological approach, and the architecture for developing a system that covers the needs for predictive maintenance in the service supply chain. It is based on Industry 4.0 technologies, such as the Internet of things, machine learning, and cloud computing. Results: As a result of the successful implementation of the system, effective equipment maintenance and service supply chain management is achieved supporting the reverse supply chain. Conclusions: This will eventually lead to fewer good-conditioned spare part replacements, just in time replacements, extended equipment life cycles, and fewer unnecessary disposals.

Supply Chain View of Tourism

Tourism being observed as a supply chain, this article describe its practices under a conceptual research framework with a special reference to education tourism. The author projects the education tourism as a continuum where both service supply chains of education and tourism are integrated. The research implication is directed towards the cross-sectoral objectives of communities involving the tourists, students and destination communities. The original thoughts and value propositions in this research are portrayed as a supply chain framework. Unlike goods supply chain management, the service supply chain of education tourism grows complex due to the coexistence of the overlapping service objectives for education and tourism. Education tourism deals with students and tourists frequently interchanging their roles; leveraging the services of the vendors and outsourced partners. The increasing complexity of education tourism demands smart technology applications to manage it as an integrated total supply chain.

Surviving the hectic early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic: a qualitative study to the supply chain strategies of food service firms in times of a crisis

PurposeThe COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown have hit the food service industry very hard. The COVID-19 outbreak has created a sharp downturn for firms in the food service industry, compelling actors across the whole food service supply chain to rethink their strategies. The purpose of this paper is to document the impact of COVID-19 on the food service supply chain, as well as to identify crisis management strategies food service firms use during the hectic early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic to survive the current and prepare for future pandemics.Design/methodology/approachWe performed a qualitative descriptive study using 21 semi-structured interviews with actors across the food service supply chain (i.e. farmers, wholesalers and food service providers). Data were collected to shed light on food service firms' decision making during the hectic early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic to uncover various crisis management strategies used.FindingsBy integrating the disaster and crisis pyramid and resilience theory, four core crisis management strategies to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic are conceptualized, i.e. (1) managing resources, (2) diversifying strategically, (3) prioritizing long-term outcomes and (4) bonding socially.Originality/valueThe theoretical contributions include documenting the performance impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the food service supply chain and exploring crisis management strategies food service firms employed during the hectic early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, functioning and survival during a pandemic, an emerging field in literature, are central to this study. Additionally, while recent research suggests that integrating crisis management and resilience literature may provide a more complete understanding of the organization–crisis relationship, these literature streams mainly developed in isolation. By integrating the literature streams of crisis management and resilience and applying these theories to the COVID-19 crisis, our study provides specific managerial guidelines.

Study on Performance Evaluation of Service Supply Chain by Extension Method

With the rapid development of the service industry, the service supply chain has become one of the most popular areas. With the logistics service supply chain being an important branch of the service supply chain, we should pay attention to the role of logistics service supply chain in enterprises. How to evaluate the logistics service supply chain comprehensively and rationally has become an important task for related enterprises to solve urgently. This paper, through extensive literature analysis and research on logistics service supply chain projects, established an indicator system composed of 18 secondary indicators from three perspectives of customer satisfaction, logistics service capabilities, and co-development ability, using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to determine the weight of each index and matter-element analysis to establish a logistics service supply chain performance evaluation model. At the end of the paper, the performance of S logistics enterprise is evaluated. The result turns out to be good, which is consistent with the actual situation, indicating that the evaluation system and method are effective and reliable.

A model of service supply chain sustainability assessment using fuzzy methods and factor analysis in oil and gas industry

Purpose The main objective of this study is to present a conceptual model of sustainable product service supply chain (SPSSC) performance assessment in the oil and gas industry. Design/methodology/approach Based on an in-depth study of the previous literature, the indicators related to PSSC performance assessment were determined. Then, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were applied to identify and confirm the sub-criteria and criteria pertaining to the proposed model. Findings The obtained results identify ten criteria related to the proposed model as follows: “Environmental performance”, “Customer performance”, “financial performance”, “Information technology Performance”, “Social Performance”, “Risk performance”, “Logistics performance”, “Operational performance”, “Organizational performance” and “performance of innovation and growth”. Research limitations/implications As the present research was conducted in the Iranian context, caution should be taken regarding the generalizability of the obtained results. Originality/value Based on a set of the identified criteria, this study proposes a conceptual model of the PSSC performance assessment in the oil and gas industry which hopefully could be useful for other organizations in this industry and other organizations in other parts of the world.