A Generalized Model of Operations Reversal for Fashion Goods

Operations reversal is a process design principle that involves switching two consecutive stages of the manufacturing process to improve process performance. In this paper we investigate conditions under which operations reversal can be used to reduce the variability—as measured by the variance and standard deviation—of production volumes at the intermediate stage of the manufacturing process. We generalize the operations reversal model of Lee and Tang (1998) to explicitly incorporate two important characteristics of fashion goods markets: heterogeneity among customers and unpredictability of customer preferences. We also present a new approach to modeling the operations reversal problem.