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Abstract:
Reverse flows are considered by many companies as the necessity or something negative being just the cause of higher costs. Nevertheless there are still more and more companies which discover the potential of reverse flows for value recovery together with companies seeing in reverse flows the source of their competitiveness. Paper presents results of exploratory survey concerning some managerial issues of reverse flows management as an important part of every company existence, especially with the notion of growing entrepreneurial costs and possibilities to get value (in various forms) from different reverse flows and also as the result of environmental requirements on management which can lead to higher interest on reverse flows value. Reverse flow management is not very frequent topic in the Czech Republic and the authors' aim was to examine present situation including the perception of reverse flows importance for value creation, perception of barriers in reverse flows management, the prevalence of managerial approaches etc. The survey was realized on the relative small sample as the first year research entry to long-term work. Therefore the results cannot be generalized - they only show some direction of the status.
Key words: reverse flows, reverse logistics, management, activities, barriers
JEL codes: M11, M29
Introduction
Reverse flows embody less or more important part of corporate processes and concerns every enterprise or organization. Though, the perception of their importance is with managers considerably different. If we abstract from companies for which reverse flows are the core of their business, the part of the rest ignore these flows (except for mandatory minimum) but some continuously become aware of the opportunities offered by reverse flows and there are also companies which consider reverse flows to be of strategic importance (Li, 2007) representing the competitive advantage or leading to the sustainable competitiveness (Mollenkopf and Closs, 2005). For some industries reverse flows can be critical for successful performance and survival (Rogers and Tibben-Lembke, 1998) and management of reverse flows is pointed out as one of the key managerial competencies (De Brito and Dekker, 2003). Proactive approach to reverse flows is hold mostly by companies, which have become conscious of value that can be obtained from these flows (De Brito and Dekker, 2003). As the support for this view findings...