Purpose

The process of redesigning is one of the essential steps in upcycling, which comprises ideation, reconstruction and fitting. This paper aims to study the best practice of upcycling in the clothing industry. This study is an attempt to standardise upcycling/redesign process.

Design/methodology/approach

An exploratory approach was adopted to perform the research. This study draws on the multiple organisations involved in the upcycling of clothes. The organisations chosen for this study are located in Sweden and Romania using the snowball technique. Semi-structured interviews, direct and participatory observation approaches were used to collect information. The collected data are systematically analysed using NVivo 10 software.

Findings

This paper provides empirical insights into the diverse practices of upcycling. Process, product and demand-based were three fundamental approaches to performing the redesigning process. The fabric quality and durability, variations in size, colour and pattern, skills and efforts required in the extraction of parts and environmental consciousness and awareness were the main factors influencing upcycling process.

Research limitations/implications

The use of the European case may miss best practices from the other region. This study may help scholars to understand the method of upcycling. A practitioner of upcycling can use the findings to improve and standardise the existing process. This research is beneficial for society, as this leads to the reduction of textile wastage.

Originality/value

This paper conceptualises some of the best practices of clothes redesign. This provides a good insight for the organisation for the improvement in the redesign business.

Purpose

Diversifying to provide third-party logistics (3PL) is an emerging trend among retail companies to benefit from underutilised warehouses and automation enhancing productivity. This paper investigates the resources and capabilities retail companies need to diversify by leveraging economies of scale.

Design/methodology/approach

Preliminary interviews with two logistics consultants helped inform the design and content of the interview guide. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with three retail companies before their diversification into 3PL services. The sample includes only retail companies specifically communicating intentions to diversify in press releases or news articles.

Findings

Retail companies diversifying to provide 3PL services strategically select 3PL customers in accordance with the retail companies’ predefined logistic limitations. This enables the retail companies to provide 3PL services to leverage their niche expertise for scale advantages. The benefits of selling competing products as their 3PL customers serve as enablers through the already existing product knowledge, investments in automation and established business networks. Therefore, diversifying contributed financially to logistics investments, which were difficult for the retail company to cover on their own, thereby mitigating risk.

Original/value

The paper contributes to understanding 3PL in the retail business landscape. The paper explains what resources and capabilities companies with underutilised warehouses need to maximise their space usage through diversification to provide 3PL services.

Purpose

This study proposes a garment modularization model based on an interactive genetic algorithm. The suggested model consists of extraction and identification of parts and the determination and implementation of connections. Rules and corresponding mathematical equations have been formulated for the part's extractions from the discarded products and connections for the redesigned products.

Design/methodology/approach

Sustainability entices scholars and practitioners while referring to reducing waste to control environmental degradation. One of the ways to safeguard natural resources is to increase the reuse of old or discarded products. The current study focuses on the redesign process to improve the reuse of products.

Findings

The intelligent system proposed based on the modularization techniques is expected to simplify and quantify the redesign process. The model can further help in the minimization of wastage and environmental degradation.

Originality/value

Presently, manual decisions are taken by the designers based on their memory, experience and intuition to extract and join the parts.

Purpose

To create economies of scale in operational units, service providers need to efficiently mix the right customers’ products in their different operational units. The purpose of the study is to explore how service providers/3PL create economies of scale by combining warehousing and sharing resources between customers, aka achieving advantages by unlocking the effects from economy of scale by increasing the utilization rate in operational units.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper has an explorative approach with data collected through semi-structured interviews. The analysis draws from economies of scale and service literature, to identify how service providers create economies of scale in everyday operations.

Findings

Service providers that create the right mix of customers for their different operational unit’s abilities to utilize economy of scale advantages, provide better services and lower cost to their customer. The service providers therefore need to create the right mix of customers, based of differences like fluctuating buying patterns and similarities like product size, weight, handling possibilities. Furthermore, understanding their customer’s customer is also a way to create the right mix of customers.

Practical implications

Service providers can be aware of the selective matching process to enable the sharing of resources between customers to create economies of scale. By selecting customers with different buying patterns but with similar product sizes the service provider can aggregate a stable demand and thereby increase utilization rate in their own operations.

Original/value

The paper contributes to an understanding of how service providers can enable economies of scale by integrating their customers. It also highlights the importance of relationships, trust and control.

This paper examines weekly and annual seasonality in incident categories to find patterns and trends in transport crime globally, concerning the value of stolen goods, incident frequency and incident category. Secondary data is utilized to analyse a contemporary challenge in logistics and supply chain research, namely theft and robbery of goods during shipment. The research is based on the TAPA global IIS transport-related crime database. Incident frequencies and mean values are analysed primarily with chi-square tests and analyses of variance (ANOVAs). The results are analysed and discussed within a frame of reference consisting of theories from logistics and criminology. The main conclusion is that there is an annual as well as a weekly seasonality of most incident categories, but the patterns vary among incident categories. The results are primarily limited by the content and classification within the TAPA IIS database.

Purpose

The purpose of the study is to explore the logistics and SC effects linked to trade wars, embargos, and sanctions, or even other geopolitical events that effects and alters the current status quo of international trade and business relations. The paper also provides a research agenda for SCM on this basis.

Design/methodology/approach

This is a conceptual paper based on a system approach, which emphasizes a holistic view instead of the characteristics of the different parts. The paper revisits macro-economic and geopolitical developments and evaluates their impact on, and implications for supply chains.

Findings

The paper frames supply chains within macro-economic and geopolitical events and their development. It shows that causal relationships between acts of trade conflict to an actual and intended change in the trade between actors are weak, paradoxical, and non-linear. Outside of conflicts, changes to the rules and regulations in international business are slow and predictable, allowing for companies and their supply chains to adapt. Trade wars make the changes in trade regulations less predictable but they are also introduced at a much higher pace. This results in higher uncertainty for all involved actors. This also results in a new supply chain systemic behaviour, which is better understood as a complex system instead of the more traditional supply chain view of stable links and nodes.

Originality/value

The paper contributes to the understanding of geopolitical developments and their implications for supply chain management and develops a specific research agenda for supply chain management.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore cargo theft risk and security for different product types at different locations along a transport chain. Design/methodology/approach: This study is based on a system-theoretical approach. The research method is deductive, as the analysis is based on secondary data and results from a questionnaire. The results are analysed based on supply chain risk management (SCRM) theories. Findings: Due to substantial interaction effects, the type of product and transport chain location must be considered to determine the correct level of security. Specifically, the product type is more significant, since the general cargo theft risk is higher. Furthermore, the transport industry has three perspectives on security responses to cargo theft, namely, demanded, needed and actual security, which differ depending on the product type and transport chain location. Research limitations/implications: This database is structured according to the global Transported Asset Protection Association organisational structure, which implies that there are three main databases: Europe, Middle East and Africa, Americas, and Asia-Pacific. Practical implications: This study has both research and practical implications, as it examines security within freight transport from three perspectives, linked to general cargo theft risk and goods owners’ requirements. Originality/value: This study addresses the contemporary SCRM problem of cargo theft using actual crime statistics and the industry understanding of required generic security levels. © 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited.

This study analyses the relationship between probability and impact for different combinations of incident and transport chain location type based on supply chain risk management theories. A deductive research method was used via employing data from the transport-related crime database incident information service (IIS). While the total risk may be the same for different probability-impact combinations, different risk management strategies are required. Regressing probability on impact gives an estimated effect of about–0.5, instead of the theoretically expected –1, indicating that an impact reducing strategy may reduce the total cargo theft risk more than a probability-focused strategy. An alternative risk ranking approach was suggested, which emphasises impact risk as more important than probability risk, implying that certain modi operandi are generating higher impact losses. The risk management strategy should therefore focus on reducing the probability for those incident categories

The purpose of this article is to analyse a business scenario, which combines the apparel rent-and-sell strategies to maximize apparel utilization while reducing the overall demand for new products. The developed game theory models hypothesize aspects including product quality, manufacturing cost, product use-cycles, and renting as alternate to buying to investigate their impact on the supply chain actors. Further, the developed supply chain scenarios have been numerically illustrated and compared against the sell-only business scenario to quantify the impact of product renting.