Reverse logistics goals, metrics, and challenges: perspectives from industry

Purpose – Although the importance of establishing sound metrics is often noted in the logistics literature, few research efforts have examined appropriate metrics for reverse logistics (RL) processes. Through the lens of goal-setting theory, the paper identifies and align salient RL goals and metrics, and uncover some of the most common challenges to RL professionals. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – The paper used open-ended questions to gather qualitative data from 84 RL professionals from the defense industry. A content analysis method was employed to extract and categorize the goals, challenges, and metrics for RL processes. Findings – The paper identifies specific categories of goals, challenges and metrics. Several themes emerged from the study, to include customer service, disposition, costs, and process efficiencies. Using these themes, the paper matched goals to metrics and found a lack of uniformity and noted that metrics and goals often were not matched or w...

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