Changes occurring in the global economy, consisting of a constant increase in international trade, are the main determinant of market development for all kinds of goods and services. The intensification of trade is a source of economic and social problems, as well as those related to managing increasingly complex flows of real goods.
Uncertainty or the inability to accurately determine consumer purchasing preferences implies various types of difficulties for the efficient and effective management of supply chains. If the development trend regarding the increase in the length and volume of supply chains, and in some cases their regionalization, is maintained, fundamental changes in the philosophy of supply chain management will have to occur in the future. These are already visible in the development of modified supply chain management concepts, such as GSCM, ESCM, or SCEM. This is reflected in the architecture of supply chains adapted to socio-economic challenges, such as the economic crisis or the greening of enterprises.
The “green” direction of change in enterprises also applies to logistics and supply chain management. In many publications, especially foreign-language ones, the subject of the latest research work is reverse logistics, sustainable logistics, or sustainable reverse logistics network management. At the same time, one can notice a gradual change in the approach to environmental issues in supply chains, which are treated on an equal footing with other areas, such as customer service or distribution. In the development of supply chain management concepts oriented towards environmental protection, a broader view of ecological issues in logistics is becoming visible. An example of the evolution of concepts can be recycling logistics, which currently constitutes one of the areas of consideration within reverse logistics and one of many in sustainable or ecological logistics. The dynamics of the emergence of new logistics concepts outlined above is the main reason for the existence of areas/fields that have not been sufficiently researched or have not been subjected to research at all. This situation applies, among other things, to the issue of reverse logistics costs, which are treated marginally in the literature and are not given much space in theoretical considerations or empirical work.
The purpose of the article is to attempt to determine the importance of reverse logistics costs in supply chain management in light of empirical research conducted, covering domestic and foreign enterprises. In the research, the authors used the method of free interviews with senior management staff of domestic and foreign enterprises involved in supply chain management and reverse logistics. They also conducted survey research on a sample of 239 suppliers to retail chains in Germany and drew attention to the impact of the seasonality phenomenon on reverse logistics costs using the example of one of the companies from the footwear manufacturing sector.
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Source: Logistyka Magazine 2/2013