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Abstract
Reverse flows are a natural part of trade and it is impossible to avoid them completely. To the contrary, we can observe several reasons fostering the impact of reverse logistics on business environment at the moment. When we surveyed the Czech companies in the year 2004, the results showed a very limited interest in reverse logistics. In majority of companies the reverse flows stood for supplementary cost and therefore the common goal was to minimize the reverse flows. Companies didn't see value, which could be retrieved to improve corporate productivity and effectiveness.
Five years later, we repeated the survey in an extended way. The research conducted in 2009 elaborates on various aspects of value creation management in reverse logistics; more specifically (1) it sheds light on management's perception of reverse logistics and companies' activities in the field of reverse logistics and (2) provides comparison of current situation with the year 2004 to describe the past development.
Keywords: Reverse logistics, Supply chain, Value creation, Environmental issues
JEL code: M10
Introduction
For several decades, the scholars and logistic professionals have elaborated on management of supply chains, pursuing economically most effective solutions. Remarkable achievements can be seen in this filed. Compared to the situation in 60-ties or 70-teis, nowadays the transformation of raw materials into final products is done substantially quicker on one hand and at lower cost on the other.
Logistics put emphasis on the total optimization of material and information flows in supply chains. Nevertheless, activities connected with reverse flows like recycling and reuse of old products (i.e. reverse flow) both remained out of focus in this total optimization approach. As a result of this reverse logistics was not elaborated by theory until mid nineties of the last century (Skapa, 2004).
In other words, the "forward" material flow, which moves from place of origin to the place of consumption, is managed rather effectively. But nowadays, as the general requirements on logistics increase as well as change, we have to require high effectiveness in reverse flow management (i.e. in reverse logistics) too. It is a fact that reverse flows became more important part of business processes in many companies or organizations (Tibben-Lembke, 1998). This change was obviously reflected by scholars and therefore we can...