Inventory Management Practices Approach to Reverse Logistics

In the last few years growing interest has been dedicated to supply chain management. Modeling complexity is added to supply chain coordination problem by accounting for reverse logistics activities. The objective of this paper is to extend inventory model of manufacturing factory with respect to the production of raw material of forward logistics and recycling material of reverse logistics. The proposed model is applied to a plastic recycling process plant located in Taiwan. The case study improvement scheme shows when the recycling rate of recycling material increases from 15% to 50%, the total inventory cost of manufacturing factory decreases by 12.82%, safety stock volume decreases by 41.19% and the reorder quantity is down by 50.96%. This paper finds whether the results of the model can reach the economic profit through quantitative analysis and encourages companies integrate reverse logistics into the supply chain system.