بازسازی اطلاعات سطح آیتم RFID : بهینه سازی، کاهش ضایعات و بهبود کیفیت

We consider RFID tags and their applications from a recycling/remanufacturing perspective and propose a novel framework to assist such process based on item-level information visibility and instantaneous tracking/tracing ability enabled by RFID. The incorporation of RFID in the reverse supply chain results in cost reduction, service & production quality improvement and pollution & waste reduction. With RFID in a reverse supply chain, we observe the power shift from waste-driven to market-driven system. Moreover, RFID's value increases with uncertainties in reverse operations as well as individual products and components.

The process of remanufacturing includes the collection of defective (due to manufacturing) and end-of-life goods as well as manufacturing byproducts and re-engineering of products back to new or as-new or refurbished condition. Although remanufacturing is not new, it is still largely undervalued with respect to its economic, environmental and social benefits as well as from a strategic business perspective. Due to its inherent properties and the need to integrate the remanufacturing processes with the regular manufacturing plan, product remanufacturing management has been faced with challenges that arise mostly as a result of uncertainty from a supply chain perspective. For instance, uncertainty from the market, inventory, processing time and materials recovered has direct impact on the manufacturing plan. As a result, the complex tasks in a remanufacturing process are generally significantly different from those in a traditional manufacturing setup. Rather than tackling a part of the problem, we find it more beneficial to optimize the remanufacturing process as a whole which makes RFID technology an ideal candidate for this purpose. Being able to reveal item-level product information in a way that is fully automatic and instantaneous, Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology not only provides a vitally important tool for supply chain management but also makes it a natural fit to optimize the product remanufacturing process. RFID is a tracking system that uses tags (silicon chips implanted in a product or its packaging) to transmit information to a wireless receiver. The tag contains relevant product information at an item-level (Zhou, 2009). Unlike bar codes that provide categorical-level information, RFID technology facilitates distinguishing individual items through unique electronic product code (EPC) values. RFID provides real-time fine-granular information to business practitioners. Its potential values in business operations have been studied and observed by researchers and practitioners to evaluate RFID projects on investment-return analysis (e.g., De Kok et al., 2008, Doerr et al., 2006, Ngai et al., 2008a, Ngai et al., 2008b, Thiesse and Fleisch, 2008, Tzeng et al., 2008, Véronneau and Roy, 2009, Ferrer et al., 2010 and Ferrer et al., 2011). We identify some of the potential benefits of using RFID in closed-loop supply chains (CLSC), followed by models that facilitate the measurement and evaluation of RFID projects. Motivated by RFID's unprecedented characteristics for auto-identification, we propose a framework to utilize RFID item-level information for product remanufacturing based on an adaptive knowledge-based system. We consider product remanufacturing process from a heuristic perspective with the goal of (1) reducing both environmental and economic wastage, (2) improving manufacturing quality to decrease the rate of defects, and (3) improving the efficiency of remanufacturing process. While academic research that lies at the intersection of IS/IT and Closed-Loop Supply Chain (CLSC) management remains scarce, we attempt to fill this gap by considering the impacts of RFID and refined-item level information in this industry. Specifically, we consider products that have manufacturing defects with some missing or defective components, end-of-life used products that have limited market and are better candidates with some salvageable component parts in them and manufacturing byproduct into consideration. Remanufactured items are sold either as new or as refurbished. Most manufacturers treat remanufactured items that are put together using unused components from defective products as new and those that were used for a short period of time as refurbished. Clearly, there are large quantities of commercial returns with no manufacturing defects. We do not consider such cases since end-of-life and end-of-use products are usually much more plentiful and are more likely to be candidates for economically viable remanufacturing. Based on a framework utilizing RFID in reverse supply chain management, we observe that RFID could be beneficial throughout the reverse supply chain including quality management of remanufactured products, cost reduction during the product diagnostic processes and better recycling management resulting in less pollution. At the strategic level, we observe that power transfers from waste management to market management with RFID because of enhanced economic incentives thanks to better remanufacturing and recycling operations. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. We begin with a brief literature review in Section 2. We present the dynamic remanufacturing framework with RFID in Section 3. We identify impacts of RFID and refined information in close-loop supply chain in Section 4. Several numerical examples are provided to illustrate the proposed model and its effectiveness. We conclude the paper in Section 5 with discussion on managerial insights garnered and their implications at the strategic level.

We considered areas where RFID can be beneficially used to improve operations in a closed-loop supply chain. From an economic incentive perspective, CLSC in general can be categorized as either market-driven or waste-driven. Remanufacturing and reverse supply chain driven by the market are normally characterized by positive profitability. On the other hand, waste-driven CLSC is also subject to government regulations and mandates with profitability not being the dominant influence. In many cases, firms decide to recycle and remanufacture even with negative profitability, driven by governmental regulations on waste. In effect, many firms do remanufacture or recycle at a cost for reasons such as corporate public image or politics and regulatory issues. Overall, firms have economic incentives to skip advanced but expensive remanufacturing processes at the higher level, but adopt low-level recycling processes at much lower cost when investment cannot be adjusted or justified based purely on economic terms. Low level recycling operations in general produce more harmful waste because the technologies used are normally characterized by irreversible processing such as burning, burying in landfill or chemical decomposition. Upper level remanufacturing operations generate relatively much less waste because most materials are fed into the forward supply chain and eventually back to the market. Let Pclsc1 represent the profit associated with running upper-level remanufacturing and Pclsc2 represent the profit of lower-level waste recycling. Ideally, if Pclsc1>Pclsc2Pclsc1>Pclsc2, the reverse supply chain would have all the incentives to form a closed-loop without passing unnecessary disposal to the lower level recycling process. Based on the discussion in Section 4, utilizing RFID-generated item-level traceability will reduce the cost of operating reverse supply chain such that equation(21) View the MathML sourcePclsc1˜=Pclsc1i+ΔCi(δ,C)+ΔQi(δ(Γ)) Turn MathJax on where both cost reduction ΔCΔC and quality improvement ΔQΔQ are greatly dependent on the uncertainty from their own operations. The potential benefits of incorporating RFID and refined information in remanufacturing are monotonically increasing with uncertainty as discussed before (Fig. 11). Fig. 12 shows that in a reverse supply chain the power shifts from waste-driven to market-driven by incorporating RFID and associated refined item-level information on components and operations. Without being able to capture uncertainty during the remanufacturing processes, the three example scenarios listed in Fig. 12 are all waste-driven given their negative profitability {A, B and C}. The vertical line that passes through A′A′, B′B′, and C′C′ represents the operational uncertainty during the repair process that can be captured by an RFID system. As a result, because of reduced operational cost along with the quality improvement in repair and refurbishment, the profitability becomes {A′{A′, B′B′ and C′}C′}. A′A′ and B′B′ show positive profitability while C′C′ still remains negative, which signifies that recycling the upper two products would become market-driven and it would make sense for them to be reused rather than disposed. At the strategic level, Fig. 13 shows that RFID-enabled remanufacturing operations would push the closed-loop supply chain from waste-driven to market-driven because of more economic and environmental incentives. As for operational uncertainty, RFID would bring more value with higher uncertainty in reverse operations. When it is waste-driven with low operational uncertainty, RFID would not bring much benefit so a non-RFID solution is suggested for the reverse supply chain. Utilizing RFID in the forward supply chain to improve product quality and reduce waste is nevertheless recommended for all scenarios. With low operational uncertainty, when remanufacturing is driven by market and economic incentives, RFID could help the remanufacturer to improve the quality of remanufactured products as well as to reduce operational cost. RFID is environmentally beneficial for recycling at the final stage of decomposing the EOL products especially in the presence of a high level of uncertainty in product sorting and recycling procedure selection. With high uncertainty in the supply chain that is market-driven, incorporating RFID would be highly valuable in all stages of the closed-loop supply chain. We introduce an innovative application of RFID in remanufacturing and considered a practical problem in RFID-enabled dynamically adjusting manufacturing/remanufacturing process. This process can be automated and operationalized in a seamless fashion through RFID-embedded component tags on individual parts. These RFID-identified manufacturing parts also empower the quality manager to continually adjust manufacturing parameters at the item-level as is deemed necessary. From studying the impacts of RFID in closed-loop supply chain management, we observe several areas where the incorporation of RFID is beneficial: (1) Improved manufacturing quality and reduced waste; (2) More efficient remanufacturing process (optimized diagnosis and reduced cost); (3) Improved quality of remanufactured products; (4) Reduced pollution in recycling/decomposition. We considered each of these in detail and observe that the level of operational uncertainty plays a critically important role to evaluate an RFID project for remanufacturing, in addition to other factors that may also be important. In general, we observe that RFID technology and refined operational information would generate more economic as well as environmental incentives to remanufacture products, shifting the reverse supply chain from waste-driven to market-driven dynamic. A limitation of this study is the omission of RFID tag and related costs. However, the relative low cost of the RFID tags (vs. the tagged product in general) and the fact that the system cost is spread across every unit of the product, is really not an issue. The results presented in this paper are still applicable.