Publication details
Substance of reverse flows in service industry
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Carpathian Logistics Congress 2013 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Management and administrative |
| Keywords | Reverse flows; reverse logistics; services; empirical research |
| Description | The paper deals with a specific part of companies activities labelled as reverse logistics (RL). The aim of RL is to retrieve value from reverse flows, such as products scraps, production waste, packaging, returned products, etc. It is generally accepted that RL is an important cost element for part of companies or even for particular industrial sectors. Hundreds of papers were published on RL, but just tiny quantity of them focused on service industry. Despite the major role of services in developed economies, this specific industry remains "under-researched" in context of RL. Thus, the ambition of the paper is to shed light on RL in service companies. The immaterial character of products (or at least a part of product) as well as other typical features of services (like inseparability, variability, perishability, etc.) call for modification of the generally accepted constructs used in RL. Therefore, the papers’ aim is to analyze/modify one basic construct: reverse flows. So, the nature of reverse flows in services is analyzed and in the next step taxonomy of reverse flows in services is suggested. For this purpose we reprocessed the primary data collected through interviews with representatives of 169 service companies operating on Czech market. |
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