Improving remanufacturing outcomes via a Cross Core Matching Reverse Bill of Materials Approach: A Case Study

Remanufacturing offers substantial environmental benefits by reducing waste materials and CO2e through the return and reconditioning of used products (cores) to a condition as good as or better than new. It also presents a range of challenges that include the reverse logistics of obtaining post use cores, and uncertainty in component regeneration rates. A typical remanufacturing process aims to create a single remanufactured product from a single core, supplementing components that cannot be reconditioned with virgin components. This creates remanufacturing bottlenecks, where either the overall regeneration rate is reduced, or a high-volume of virgin components are required, reducing the environmental benefit of remanufacturing. To overcome these bottlenecks, we propose a Core Cross-Matching Reverse Bill of Materials (CCM-RBoM) approach where multiple cores of different types are disassembled into their constituent components, reconditioned and re-assembled into various re-manufactured product types thus mitigating the requirement for large disassembly volumes, or substitution of virgin components to compensate for low regeneration rates. In this paper, we detail the CCM-RBoM approach, implement it into a production planning tool, and through simulation and use of a real-world automotive dataset, demonstrate potential improvements when compared to a typical 1:1 remanufacturing process. Results reveal: CO2e reductions of 25% per remanufactured product per core; and, 25% decrease in disassembly operations required for maximum utilisation of reconditioned components in a remanufactured production batch. The results suggest that CCM-RBoM can enable a shift from high volume disassembly to a targeted disassembly plan, maximizing reconditioned component use and sustainability of the remanufacturing process.