Reverse Supply Chain Analysis

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Over the last decades, the issue ' reverse logistics' has been moved much higher up the agenda, owing to the increasing environmental awareness, regulatory initiatives and economic pressure. Individual companies have gradually included the backward flows of end-of-life and end-of-use products within their scope of logistics planning and control, to increase their efficiency and effectiveness and create more sustainable supply chain. The purpose of this work is to investigate a single period supply chain model that consists of a manufacturer and a retailer where the retailer simultaneously determine the manufacturer wholesale price, retailer price and order quantity while experiencing customer returns. We also discuss estimation of the serviceable return rate in practical situations. The research is focuses on commercial returns for repairs and maintenances. Empirical data was collected through a comprehensive literature review of earlier studies over this topic.
Keywords: Reverse supply chain, reverse logistics, reverse supply chain processes, strategy, Single period products, Purchasing,
1. INTRODUCTION
Reverse supply chain refers to the movement of goods from customer to vendor. This is the reverse of the traditional supply chain movement of goods from vendor to customer. Reverse logistics is the process of planning, implementing and controlling the efficient and effective inbound flow and storage of secondary goods and related information for the purpose of recovering value or proper disposal. There are various types of reverse supply chains, and they arise at different stages of the product cycle; however, most return supply chains are organized to carry out five key processes:
• Product acquisition: Obtaining the used produc...

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... the selling period and if some of the reused products are returned again this will probably happen after the end of the period. Another key assumption is that the fraction of returns which arrives in time to be reused is independent of the total sales. This is called serviceable return rate and it is denoted by k (0 <= k <= 1). The estimation of k, which largely depends on L, is not easy.. Serviceable return rate k is used to adjust the order quantity and provide an expression for expected profit using an analysis similar to problems without reuse. This method is often used to model returns in various reverse logistic situations and it provides quite accurate results for reasonable return rates as Van der Laan et al. (1996) and Fleischmann et al. (1997) have shown. This assumption enables the analytical solutions of the models presented in the following paragraph.

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