Performance analysis of the closed loop supply chain

PurposeThe question of resource scarcity and emerging pressure of environmental legislations hasbrought a new challenge for the manufacturing industry. On the one hand, there is a hugepopulation that demands a large quantity of commodities; on the other hand, these demandshave to be met by minimum resources and pollution. Resource conservative manufacturing(ResCoM) is a proposed holistic concept to manage these challenges. The successfulimplementation of this concept requires cross functional collaboration among relevant fields,and among them, closed loop supply chain is an essential domain. The paper aims tohighlight some misconceptions concerning the closed loop supply chain, to discuss differentchallenges, and in addition, to show how the proposed concept deals with those challengesthrough analysis of key performance indicators (KPI).MethodsThe work presented in this paper is mainly based on the literature review. The analysis ofperformance of the closed loop supply chain is done using system dynamics, and the Stellasoftware has been used to do the simulation.FindingsThe results of the simulation depict that in ResCoM; the performance of the closed loopsupply chain is much enhanced in terms of supply, demand, and other uncertainties involved.The results may particularly be interesting for industries involved in remanufacturing,researchers in the field of closed loop supply chain, and other relevant areas.