Best paper award
Around the end of each year I ask the members of the Editorial Board to nominate papers for this special mention. It is perhaps awkward to describe any paper as the ‘best’ since all papers published have been judged to be within the scope of the journal and have undergone a thorough peer review process. But it is instructive to see what papers are proving popular and it can certainly provide some encouragement for the authors concerned. It can also provide future writers with clues to current important topics that are of interest to the Journal. The criteria used by the Board for these nominations are the ones the Journal applies in general: relevance to an industrial problem; usefulness of findings to managers, consultants or software developers; and guidance for future researchers. Naturally there is some variation in the balance of these elements between the papers but the principle of relevance to industry should always be clear.
The trend noted last year was the increasing importance of supply chain issues in Production Planning & Control. This has continued, and it is clear that the issues of co-ordination of suppliers in various kinds of networks are currently of great importance in industry. This concern is clearly involved in all the papers I will mention. But apart from that–or together with it in this case–is the increasing attention being focused on the management of remanufacturing operations. This is the motivation for the Best Paper from Volume 18, by G.W. DePuy, J.S. Usher, R.L. Walker, and G.D. Taylor, ‘Production planning for remanufactured products’, pp. 573–583.
Remanufacturing is the process of taking used items and by various operations according to their condition, returning them to a like-new state at which point they can be used with the same confidence, and generally the same warranty, as ‘new’ equivalents. ‘Take-Back’ regulations and other environmental pressures, together with the simple economic advantages and the surprising reliability benefits are encouraging more and more manufacturers to look at this approach, and the authors address one of the main difficulties, the planning of production when the quality of components is unreliable. The paper is based on a real remanufacturing process, and a case study outlines the views of the engineers concerned in the business upon the approach proposed by the researchers.
I would also like to mention the following papers that were well recommended from Volume 18:
‘Improving supply chain integration using a workload control concept and web-functionality’, by M. Stevenson and L.C. Hendry, No. 2, pp. 142–155.
‘A review of eBusiness and digital business–applications, models and trends’, by B. Wall, H. Jagdev, and J. Browne, No. 3, pp. 239–260.
‘Coordinated responsiveness for volatile toy supply chains’, by C.Y. Wong and H.–H. Hvolby, No. 5, pp. 407–419.
‘Aligning supply chain design with manufacturing strategies in developing regions’, by S.B. Taps and K. Steger-Jensen, No. 6, pp. 475–486.
‘Investigating the effect of product variants and demand distributions on the optimal demand supply network setup’, by T. Tynjälä and E. Eloranta, No. 7, pp. 561–572.
Production Planning & Control is keen to publish research on the management of operations in all industries. Papers describing new approaches and new problems to solve are equally welcome.
Stephen J. Childe
Editor
