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Maintenance‐related costs contribute significantly to equipment life‐cycle costs. In practice, maintenance works are not perfect in the sense that they cannot restore the equipment to a “good‐as‐new” condition. Utilizing the concept of improvement factors to model the imperfect characteristics of most maintenance works, proposes a model which determines the number and timing of preventive maintenance works which are required before the equipment is overhauled. It also determines how many overhauls will be economically required before a decision is made to dispose of the equipment. The equipment disposal decision is based on an analysis of replacements which are constraints to be at the end of time cycles which may have unequal numbers of time‐periods and where the time‐periods do not have to be of equal length. This proposed replacement analysis is an extension of a well‐known replacement model in the literature.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how the use of information technology (IT) and supply chain management initiatives (information sharing and collaboration) impact a company's performance in reverse logistics (RL).

A survey based on a previous exploratory research and literature review was sent out to 600 US companies having substantial activities in RL. Issues addressed in the survey, such as IT types deployed, IT operational attributes, information sharing, and collaboration, involve multiple parties in multi‐tier RL networks, extending beyond a simple buyer‐supplier dyad.

The results revealed that the type of IT used per se did not have a differential impact on a company's performance in RL. However, IT operational attributes positively affected RL performance and information sharing and collaboration are critical to RL performance.

Investment in IT alone cannot improve a company's performance; managers should take full account of IT attributes when deciding IT in RL. IT operational attributes tend to support one another – an improvement in one would lead to improvements in the others. With no exception in RL, companies need to share information and collaborate with their partners.

The paper reports an empirical survey of the IT use and collaboration practices in RL, and provides insights into the relationships and impacts of IT, RL operational attributes, information sharing, and collaboration on one another as well as on RL performance.

Although each maintenance task performed on an item of equipment may enhance its reliability, neither preventive nor overhaul maintenance can return the equipment to good‐as‐new condition. Applying the concept of maintenance improvement factors to both types of maintenance, mathematical models are developed that are used to generate preventive and overhaul maintenance schedules. Examples are provided to demonstrate the sensitivity of the schedules to model parameters.

This study considers a supply‐demand situation where a product has only a handful of supply firms and a large number of purchasing firms and compares the attitudes toward partnering of firms which are already in partnering relationships with those that are not. Noting that only 27 per cent of the buyers are currently in any alliance relationships, and most are not planning to be in one, the study reveals that buyers expressed a lukewarm, and sometimes negative, attitude toward the formation of alliances. There are no attitudinal differences between firms in alliance relationships, compared with those without, in five of seven questions on alliance and in the relative importance given 14 of 15 purchasing criteria. With most suppliers willing to provide the buyers with the same benefits, irrespective of whether they are in alliance relationships, it appears that the limitations imposed by the small supply base tend to exert competitive pressures on the suppliers, discouraging buyers from forming partnership relationships.

This study seeks to investigate, through the development of an operationalized service quality construct in the context of a service factory, whether the typology to which a service belongs may explain the nature of the service quality (SQ) construct and its relationship to customer satisfaction (SAT) and behavioral intentions (BI).

An exploratory factor analysis used a sample from undergraduate student respondents. Then, a more representative sample of hotel guests was used, in a second‐order confirmatory factor analysis.

The dominant dimensions of SQ construct in the service factory were found to be: Tangibles, Recovery, Responsiveness, and Knowledge. Further results indicate that, although the direct effect of SQ on BI is significant, the indirect effect (with SAT playing a mediating role) is a stronger driver for BI in the context of the service factory.

A notable limitation is that the present study focuses only on the service factory and uses only one industry (lodging) to illustrate the findings. Future research should examine other service categories.

Service managers are recommended to devise operations and marketing strategies that focus on the dominant SQ dimensions in order to enhance SAT and, in turn, foster positive BI.

This study demonstrates that SQ, SAT and BI and their interrelationships may be typology‐specific. If this is true, two or more industries (e.g. airlines and lodging) may exhibit similar relationship characteristics with regard to these constructs if they belong to the same service category. This knowledge is useful for benchmarking best practices among such industries.