Forecasting product returns for production planning and control in remanufacturing

There is a growing focus on sustainability in corporate objectives. A key approach to managing and implementing sustainability is through operations management. Sustainable operations hold the key to increased profitability and effective management of environmental issues. Among the business processes used for sustainability is reuse. A key preferred component of reuse is remanufacturing. Legislation trends, as evidenced in the European Union, are forcing manufacturers to take back and put products back into the market, after remanufacturing. The remanufacturing may be done by either the manufacturer or a remanufacturer. In this study, we consider a manufacturer that also acts as a remanufacturer, and develop a generalized forecasting approach to determine the returns of used products, as well as integrate it with an inventory model to enable production planning and control.