Reverse Supply Chain Management

Abstract

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 pressures. Individual companies have gradually included the backwards 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 chains. The purpose of this work is to explore the possibility for individual companies to incorporate forwards supply chain strategies into their reverse supply chains, in particular lean, agile and leagile strategies, and to examine under which circumstances each strategy should be applied respectively. The research is delimitated within electronic industry, and focuses on commercial returns for repairs and maintenances. Empirical data was collected through a number of interviews with electronic retailers, which reveals the current situation of commercial returns in electronic industry. The findings were analyzed in collaboration with a comprehensive literature review of earlier studies over this topic, based on which conclusions to the research questions were generated as well as suggestions for future researches.