Driven by sustainability, companies and customers alike are looking to set up a closed loop supply chain whereby products are returned to be ‘remanufactured’ (i.e., process to retain the usefulness of the product or the components). These product returns trigger a reverse manufacturing supply chain (REMASC). Companies are in need for tools that support both operational aspects, as well as strategic decision making related to the management of its remanufacturing activities.

In this SBO project, Flanders Make will develop tools linked to three innovation goals:

1. To support strategic decision making related to the characteristics of product(family)-customer relationships required for product returns to be(come) a profitable business model. To this end REMASC will analyse and propose rewarding strategies.
2. To forecast (based on product type and customer profiles) the volume, reason for return, … of these product returns in order to organize the product inbound. It will provide tools to trigger fast decision making related to the quality of the product returned, i.e., deciding on ‘waste’ vs. defining the steps needed for the actual remanufacturing of the collected ‘core’.  
3. To efficiently manage the remanufacturing of returned products. This includes task generation, planning and scheduling of the remanufacturing activities; inventory management; needs for quality assessment and the potential integration of these remanufacturing activities in a classical manufacturing site.

Enabled by industry 4.0 principles (such as digital product passports) and driven by sustainability, tools for managing the reverse manufacturing supply chain will benefit both end-users (OEM, TIER-1, TIER-2 and material providers), as well as service solutions providers (supply chain support, data analysis, logistics, ERP/MES integrators, operator support systems).