News from the Chair of Factory Planning and Intralogistics

Our colleague Mario Henrique Bueno Moreira Callefi recently visited the Department of Production and Operations Management at FGV EAESP, Brazil. The visit aimed to explore opportunities for future research collaborations, with a special focus on emerging technologies and supply chain innovation. During the visit, promising directions for joint academic work were discussed. As part of the academic exchange, Dr. Callefi and Professor Maciel Queiroz shared insights on ongoing research initiatives, and identified potential synergies for collaborative projects that combine theoretical contributions with managerial relevance.

Resilience is an important approach to surviving gray and black swan events. However, resilience is difficult to grasp because it is a dynamic phenomenon, and we are also talking about events with a low probability but a high impact. An article from the Chair of Factory Planning and Intralogistics on resilience as a quality of the system rather than a key performance indicator demonstrates ways in which resilience can be captured. The article Supply chain resilience as a system quality: survey-based evidence from multiple industries was selected by the International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management as one of the three most frequently cited articles of the last 12 months.

Our professorship's hiking day is firmly established. Once a year, we lace up our hiking boots, pack our rucksacks and head out into the countryside. This time we headed north to the Striegistal valley. Pure nature and varied with sections mainly across meadows, through forests and along the water. The tour, which was a good twelve kilometers long in total, and the stop for lunch offered plenty of room for conversations off the beaten track, interesting discoveries and even a successful search for a geocache or two.

The Associate Researcher Mario Henrique Bueno Moreira Callefi recently visited the Department of Process Engineering at the University of Pannonia, in Veszprém, Hungary. The visit aimed to explore opportunities for future research collaborations, with a special focus on qualitative research approaches and causality analysis models. During the visit, promising directions for joint academic work were discussed, particularly in areas involving content analysis and the use of digital tools to support qualitative inquiry. As part of the exchange, Dr. Callefi also conducted a brief presentation on the NVivo software and demonstrated how it can be effectively applied to content analysis to enhance the rigor and structure of research processes. The interaction marked an essential step towards strengthening international cooperation and building interdisciplinary research bridges between institutions.

Environmental sustainability is a main research topic in supply chain management, including sustainable, green, closed-loop, and circular supply chain management concepts. Our paper "On cost and revenue in circular supply chains: Where to close the loop?” has now been named the best research paper of 2024 by the journal Cleaner Logistics and Supply Chain. The study assessed cost and revenue sharing by analytically modeling monetary flows in linear and circular multi-tier supply chains. Results show that firms upstream of the loop-closer are negatively affected by the reuse of material. Press release

The Chair of Factory Planning and Intralogistics is once again supporting the organization of the POMS College of Operational Excellence (OPEX) mini-conference, which will take place on May 8, 2025, in Atlanta. The mini-conference will feature a keynote speech by Elliot Bendoly on "Skeptical Adaptability: Systematic thoughtfulness when confronting uncertainty, change and new technological opportunities" as well as pitches for the best paper award. The best paper award was organized by our chair this year. The POMS conference is one of the world's most important conferences on production and supply chain management.