Decision and information interoperability for improving performance of product recovery systems

Enterprises around the world are employing product/resource recovery practices to overcome global competition, meet heightened environmental regulations, and seek additional profit making opportunities. These factors in addition to the inherent cost and complexity of recovery processes are due to multidimensional factors and relationships associated with the quality, variety, timeliness, demand changes, and logical processing of product returns. A Reverse Enterprise System (RES) perspective will give scope to develop a flexible system that can handle products with various options and greater return volumes and variability. It explores the various recovery functions and product lifecycle stages and suggests some key business and performance measurement strategies that can be employed to be successful in returns handling. We observed that different recovery nodes act in a relatively autonomous fashion to decide what type and level of flexibility to use, what and when the information is required to be shared for improving decision performance and obtaining benefits from the recovery process. Finally, this paper proposes a semi/partially and fully flexible decision model that facilitates decision and information interoperability functions from the perspective of an enterprise engaged in or planning to be engaged in product recovery processes.Department of Industrial and Systems Engineerin