Assessment of Influence of Products' Reliability on Remanufacturing Processes

Remanufacturing is a process of recapturing value from returned products. Whole products are brought back to like-new condition. The seven factors, that make production planning and process control for remanufacturing more complicated than equivalent activities in normal manufacturing, have been proposed in literature. The main ones are the uncertain timing and quantity of returns. There is a lack of reliability based forecasting models to better predict products life-cycles, return rates and quantities. Only one reliability based production planning method for remanufacturing has been proposed. It identifies two return reasons and it is appropriate only for single-use products. In practice most of products are serviced and returned only in specific cases. In this article seven different return reasons have been identified and the third one has been investigated. Others will be studied in future papers.