The Impact of Reverse Flow on Supply Chain Management of Atlas Battery Ltd.

The Impact of reverse flow on Supply Chain Management of Atlas battery Ltd.

Variables:

Independent Variables:                

Retailer responce.

Forcast accuracy.

Battery quality / performance.

Dependent Variable:

Sale of new battery / Battery waste.

Hypothesis

Ho: Reverse flow of battery has an impact on SCM performance.

Ha:Reverse flow of battery do not create any impact on SCM performance.

Introduction/Background:

It is clear that due to different market for used products, different end users and different cost concentrations, reverse supply chain is not necessarily a symmetric picture of the forward supply chain. Thus, for any company redesigning it’s reverse supply chain network almost from scratch is the best option. From a methodological standpoint, reverse chain can be modeled separately, which would also reduce the problem size significantly.

A hypothetical case of reverse chain where the returned products (either due to some fault or having reached their end of life) are picked up from various locations like stores or customer collection sites, transported to collection sites where they may be stored. The products are then transported from the collection sites to the refurbishing or recycling sites. The model is to find an efficient strategy to return the defective products from a set of originating sites to specific collection sites, which in turn will ship them to refurbishing sites for remanufacturing / proper disposal.

The model also attempts to find the maximum number of units, which could be shipped from the origin to the refurbishing sites and at optimum overall cost. To assist in modeling of the chain we make certain assumptions. We assume:

1.The products or commodities concerned have traveled the forward chain and are currently in the hands of the customers.

2.The retailer or wholesaler is considered to be an initial collection point. This is a realistic assumption, as the customer would be generally inclined to return the product to the closest originating site to get a refund or to purchase another one.

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