Logística Inversa

2008 International Conference on Information Management, Innovation Management and Industrial Engineering

REVERSE LOGISTICS
Chaihou Zhao1,2, Weiming Liu1, Bei Wang3 1 School of Communication, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China, 510641 2 School of Economics and Management, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China, 510631 3 Guangdong University of Technology,Guangzhou, China, 510520 E-mail:lukeciombei@sina.com, wangbei2000@yahoo.com Abstract
Environmental concerns and rapid development of e-commerce bring a new focused field in reverse logistics. In order to avoid return losses and add customers’ value, there is a need for companies to find proper ways to reduce wastes and recover the value from used products for further utilities. All these challenges makereverse logistics a contemporary area of interest among managers and researchers of this field. The paper proposed the reasons of practicing reverse logistics and the implications of reverse logistics. The differences between reverse logistics and traditional forward logistics; and green logistics and closed-loop supply chain are analyzed. Moreover, reverse logistics’ distinct characteristics suchas supply uncertainty and operational difficulties are pointed out. Based on qualitative and quantitative case study methods, the typical managerial and operational practices of reverse logistics are discussed in detail in this paper. By concluding, the paper presented possible directions for further investigations on this subject.

2.1. Environmental Concerns
In the past decades, due todwindling landfill and incineration capacities and growing environmental concern to the limited natural resources, waste reduction has becomes a primary challenge for industrialized countries. More and more environmental legislations are imposed on the OEM to take corresponding responsibility for the whole life cycle of their products[1]. In many European countries, producers are required to take backpackaging from their customers. In the U.S., local and state governments are often responsible for the recycling packaging. In the EU, the WEEE (waste from electrical and electronic equipment) directive requires end of life equipment to be collected for recovery, recycling and reuse by end 2003[2].

2.2. Economical Drives
Nowadays, the ‘green’ image has been increasingly recognized as animportant marketing element. Similarly, proper recovery options such as direct reuse or remanufacturing may he economically attractive because they bring real benefits in some occasions. In order to attract more potential customers, liberal return policies have been widely adopted. Companies have to bear enormous losses from huge returned products of customers. In 1999 the costs of reverse logistics areestimated to be one half of the percentage of the total U.S. GDP. The overall amount of reverse logistics activities and costs are large and still growing[3]. The challenges of how to reduce wastes and recover the value from used products for further utility make reverse logistics become a contemporary area of focus among managers and researchers of this field.

1. Introduction
Reverselogistics deals with the processes associated with the reverse stream from owners to re-users. It encompasses all the logistic activities from used products no longer required by the users to products again usable in a market. The notion ‘reverse’ denotes that the direction of physical flow in reverse logistics is opposite to the conventional forward supply chain. A large number of references are quoted.This paper provides a review and content analysis of scientific literature of reverse logistics case studies and mathematics models.

2. Reasons of Practicing Reverse Logistics
978-0-7695-3435-0/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICIII.2008.42 349

3. Implications of Reverse Logistics

Definitions of reverse logistics dates back to 1992[4,5]. The conception of reverse logistics was...