Contingency planning is the first stage in developing a formal set of production planning and control activities for the reuse of products obtained via return flows in a closed-loop supply chain. The paper takes a contingency approach to explore the factors that impact production planning and control for closed-loop supply chains that incorporate product recovery. A series of three cases are pr...

Closed loop supply chain aims at integrating return products in the traditional supply chain processes. The return flows generate new uncertain elements (returns and leadtimes) and optimization of inventory control in this context is a complex issue. Inventory policies have to generate good performances (service level, cost) and be easy to implement in practice. A supply chain model based on si...