An investigation of lead-time effects in manufacturing/remanufacturing systems under simple PUSH and PULL control strategies

In this paper we extend the PUSH and PULL control strategies defined by van der Laan et al. (E.A. van der Laan, M. Salomon, R. Dekker, Production planning and inventory control for remanufacturable durable products, Working paper 9531/A, Econometric Institute, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 1995) to evaluate numerically the effects of lead-time duration and lead-time variability on total expected costs in production/inventory systems with remanufacturing. Although both strategies are non-optimal, they are relatively easy to analyse numerically and, more importantly, they are actually used in practice. The most important outcomes of the study are, that for both control strategies: (i) manufacturing lead-times have a larger influence on system costs than remanufacturing lead-times; (ii) a larger remanufacturing lead-time may sometimes result in a cost decrease; and (iii) a larger variability in the manufacturing lead-time may sometimes result in a cost decrease.