RFID-based product information in end-of-life decision making

With the increasing pressure on manufacturing companies to manage their end-of-life products, the availability of information to improve product recovery decisions is becoming critical. In fact, a fundamental obstacle in making efficient product recovery decisions is the loss of information associated with the product after the point-of-sale. We show qualitatively that the availability of product information has a positive impact on product recovery decisions, and discuss how radio-frequency identification (RFID)-based product identification technologies can be employed to provide the necessary information. The paper also investigates how recovery decisions can be modelled to represent the impact of product information on those decisions. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.