An information-centric approach to enterprise modelling for product recovery

Recovery of used products and materials is becoming a field of rapidly growing importance. The scope and scale of product recovery have expanded tremendously over the past decade. Recent changes in government legislation in various countries and increasing customer awareness towards greener products have forced the manufacturers to rethink their business strategies. This has also resulted in new business opportunities in the area of remanufacturing and a large number of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have appeared in the recovery industry. These SMEs include reprocessing and recycling companies as well as freight forwarders and warehousing companies. Recovery firms have to deal with customer demands and returns that are largely dependant on the state of the art in technology. They change without any warnings and unfortunately a third party recovery firm has little control over them as compared to an original equipment manufacturer (OEM). In such situations, these companies must not only quickly adapt to the changes but also continuously evolve to survive in the market. They have to be versatile, changeable and able to quickly redesign and modify their own facilities and processes to cope with the changing situations. This paper presents an information–centred formal model for product recovery enterprises to aid the designers with modelling and evaluation tools to enable progressive design of the enterprise. The modelling exercise in this work involves description of the different views of the enterprise, namely strategic view, physical view, functional view and performance view. The analysis of the system (as part of the performance view) has been carried out using simulation.