Assessment of products' reliability influence on remanufacturing processes

Remanufacturing is a process of recapturing value from returned products. Whole products are brought back to like-new condition. The seven factors, that make production planning and process control for remanufacturing more complicated then equivalent activities in normal manufacturing, had been proposed in literature. The main one is the uncertain timing and quantity of returns. There is a lack of reliability based forecasting models to better predict products life-cycles, return rates and quantities. Only one reliability based production planning method for remanufacturing had been proposed. It identifies two return reasons and it is appropriate only for single-use products. In practice most of products are serviced and return only in specific cases. In this article seven different return reasons has been identified and third one has been investigated. Other will be studied in future papers.