Decision Support Tool for Implementation of Remanufacturing in an Enterprise

Abstract

Several global challenges exist that force manufacturing organizations to reduce the environmental impact of their products. Nowadays, the most common practices of products’ end-of-life stage are landfilling and recycling. However, there are several other practices for products’ end-of-life management that support reduction of environmental impact. One such option is remanufacturing which is a product-recovery option that gives the opportunity to produce new products by using products that have already reached their end-of-life stage. In the process, all modules and components are disassembled, and the used parts – recovered. Depending on the product remanufactured, the process helps reducing energy consumption by 85%, avoiding up to 60% of emissions and saving up to 85% of raw materials, thus reducing the environmental impact considerably. Still, many barriers exist that prevent manufacturing enterprises from implementing the remanufacturing process. To assist enterprises, a decision support tool based on system dynamics modeling has been developed. The paper presents the decision support tool, and shows how the decision of implementing the remanufacturing process in an enterprise changes its performance with respect to environmental and economic aspects.