Sustainable Operations and Closed-Loop Supply Chain

抄録

Increasing demands for the world's remaining natural resources have made it clear that Japan must work more closely with other nations to move for the establishment of an environmentally sustainable society. Japan is facing environmental problems such as resource constraints and depletion of mineral resources and there is a tendency for many companies to implement remanufacturing systems due to these issues. As a result, reusing products or parts of products is an important business strategy. In this paper, we investigate sustainable operations from the basis that closed-loop supply chains are a key aspect of environmental sustainability. Specifically, we propose an optimal ordering policy of parts in remanufacturing in a closed-loop supply chain. The manufacturer in the supply chain decides the order quantity of new and reused parts to minimize the total costs. The total costs of the manufacturer include the ordering cost of parts, the holding cost of products and cost of opportunity loss. As a case study, we apply our proposed policy to a product of a certain corporation and confirm the efficiency of the proposal.