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Recently, the demand for third-party logistics providers has become extremely relevant and the key subject for businesses to enhance their service quality and minimize logistics costs. The key success factor for an e-commerce business is product delivery, and the third-party logistics service provider is responsible for that. Each 3PLP has its own business characteristics, meaning it is important to select the most suitable logistics provider for the e-commerce business. This study uses a combination of grey relational analysis (GRA) and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method, assisting decision makers in choosing the best logistics service provider for their e-business. A case study of an e-commerce company based in Faisalabad, Pakistan, was selected to demonstrate the steps of the proposed methods. In this process, seven criteria of logistics suppliers were considered, and then the best alternatives among four logistics provider companies were selected using the proposed method.

Due to the need for resource utilization and environmental protection, remanufacturing is used as an effective means to achieve a circular economy. To focus on the production and sales of new products, manufacturers outsource the remanufacturing of used products to remanufacturers. Aiming at helping manufacturers to choose between self-remanufacturing and outsourcing remanufacturing policies, a closed-loop supply chain network equilibrium model considering the remanufacturing policy options is established. The equilibrium decision-making is obtained by using the variational inequality method. Furthermore, the criteria for manufacturers to choose between the two remanufacturing policies based on different factors such as recovery rates of the used products, remanufacturing costs, and environmental impact parameters, are given. Numerical examples show the following results: (1) When compared with self-remanufacturing policy, outsourcing remanufacturing policy can save resources, increase the sales of products, and have a smaller environmental impact. (2) When the recycling rate of used products is low, choosing an outsourcing remanufacturing policy can increase the sales of products. When the recycling rate is high, choosing a self-remanufacturing policy can get more profits. (3) When the costs of a self-remanufacturing policy and an outsource-remanufacturing policy are quite different, choosing the outsourcing remanufacturing policy can save resources and protect the environment.

On the heels of the online shopping boom during the Covid-19 pandemic, the electronic commerce (e-commerce) surge has many businesses facing an influx in product returns. Thus, relevant companies must implement robust reverse logistics strategies to reflect the increased importance of the capability. Reverse logistics also plays a radical role in any business’s sustainable development as a process of reusing, remanufacturing, and redistributing products. Within this context, outsourcing to a third-party reverse logistics provider (3PRLP) has been identified as one of the most important management strategies for today’s organizations, especially e-commerce players. The objective of this study is to develop a decision support system to assist businesses in the selection and evaluation of different 3PRLPs by a hybrid fuzzy multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) approach. Relevant criteria concerning the economic, environmental, social, and risk factors are incorporated and taken into the models. For obtaining more scientific and accurate ranking results, linguistic terms are adopted to reduce fuzziness and uncertainties of criteria weights in the natural decision-making process. The fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) is applied to measure the criteria’s relative significance over the evaluation process. The fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (FTOPSIS) is then used to rank the alternatives. The prescribed method was adopted for solving a case study on the 3PRLP selection for an online merchant in Vietnam. As a result, the most compatible 3PRLP was determined. The study also indicated that “lead time,” “customer’s voice,” “cost,” “delivery and service,” and “quality” are the most dominant drivers when selecting 3PLRLs. This study aims to provide a more complete and robust evaluation process to e-commerce businesses and any organization that deals with supply chain management in determining the optimized reverse logistics partners.

Innovation is essential for driving business survival, development, and growth. Today, managers within firms continuously search for new ways to gain competitive advantage. In many cases, this comes from the effective use of intangible assets such as workplace skills and abilities. Despite this, little is known about what types of skills are required for innovation, whether these vary by innovation-type, or whether it matters if these skills are outsourced. This paper addresses these issues using data collected on eight skill types as part of the 2008–2010 Irish Community Innovation Survey. We find that there is substantial heterogeneity in the effectiveness of skills at generating different kinds of innovation. In addition, for some types of innovation, it is best to develop the skills in-house (e.g., Engineering skills for product innovation) while for others it is best to outsource the skills (e.g., Multimedia skills for process and organisational innovation).

International audience; Using a comprehensive data set for French manufacturing firms with over twenty employees, the authors quantify the use of outsourcing and show how it has spread since the mid-1980s, leading to the substitution of external labour for in-house labour. Empirical analysis suggests that firms outsource in order to bypass the effects of the employment relationship and circumvent their labour law obligations.

From iDASH Privacy and Security Workshop 2016; International audience; Cloud computing is becoming the preferred solution for efficiently dealing with the increasing amount of genomic data. Yet, outsourcing storage and processing of sensitive data, such as genomic data, comes with important concerns related to privacy and security. This calls for new sophisticated techniques that ensure data protection from untrusted cloud providers and still enables researchers to obtain useful information. We present a novel privacy-preserving algorithm for fully outsourcing the storage of large genomic data files to a public cloud and enable researchers to efficiently search for variants of interest. To preserve data and query confidentiality from possible leakage, our solution exploits optimal encoding for genomic variants and combines it with homomorphic encryption and private information retrieval. The proposed algorithm is implemented in C++ and evaluated on real data as part of the 2016 iDash genome privacy-protection challenge. Results show that our solution outperforms the state-of-the-art and enables researchers to search over millions of encrypted variants in a few seconds. As opposed to prior beliefs that sophisticated privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) are unpractical for real operational settings, our solution demonstrates that, in the case of genomic data, PETs can represent very efficient enablers.

This paper addresses the single-item, dynamic lot-sizing problem for systems with remanufacturing and outsourcing. Therein, demand and return amounts are deterministic over a finite planning horizon. Demand may be satisfied by the manufacturing of new items, remanufactured items, or outsourcing, but it cannot be backlogged. The objective of this study is to determine the lot sizes for manufacturing, remanufacturing, and outsourcing that minimise the total cost, which consists of the holding costs for returns and manufactured/remanufactured products, setup costs, and outsourcing costs. The problems addressed in this paper are an extension of those addressed by Richter et al. (2000,and 2001), Teunter et al. (2006), and Aksen et al. (2003). In this paper, the separate setup costs scheme is considered, we propose a dynamic programming approach to derive the optimal solution in the case of large quantities of returned product. The complexity of this dynamic programming approach is O ( T 2 ), wherein T is the number of periods in the planning horizon.

Using firm level data from the Irish Community Innovation Survey 2008–2010 we analyse the importance of eight skill sets for the innovation performance of firms. We distinguish between radical and incremental innovation. Our results suggest that there is substantial heterogeneity in the importance of skills for different types of innovation and that some skills are best sourced from outside the firm while others are best developed in-house.

This paper presents the results of systematically reviewing the current research literature on the use of agile practices and lean software development in global software engineering (GSE). The primary purpose is to highlight under which circumstances they have been applied efficiently. Some common terms related to agile practices (e.g. scrum, extreme programming) were considered in formulating the search strings, along with a number of alternatives for GSE such as offshoring, outsourcing, and virtual teams. The results were limited to peer-reviewed conference papers/journal articles, published between 1999 and 2009. The synthesis was made through classifying the papers into different categories (e.g. research type, distribution). The analysis revealed that in most cases agile practices were modified with respect to the context and situational requirements. This indicates the need for future research on how to integrate all experiences and practices in a way to assist practitioners when setting up non-collocated agile projects.