Managing return flow of end-of-life products for product recovery operations

Abstract

Increased consciousness on environment and sustainability, leads companies to apply environmentally friendly strategies such as product recovery and product return management. These strategies are generally applied in reverse logistics concept. Implementing reverse logistics successfully becomes complicated for companies due to uncertain parameters of the system like quantity, quality and timing of returns. A forecasting methodology is required to overcome these uncertainties and manage product returns. Accurate forecasting of product return flows provides insights to managers of reverse logistics. This paper proposes a forecasting model based on grey modelling for managing end-of-life products’ return flow. Grey models are capable for handling data sets characterized by uncertainty and small sized. The proposed model is applied to data set of a specific end-of-life product. Attained results show that the proposed forecasting model can be successfully used as a forecasting tool for product returns and a supportive guidance can be provided for future planning.

 

Keywords: End-of-life products, grey modelling, product return flow, product recovery;