With the advent of the globalization, warehouses serves distant markets and presents a very low stock turnaround time. In this process, huge quantities of materials are discarded at the end of the logistics chain. These materials represent a considerable financial ammount and, if improperly discarded, can cause an environmental disaster. In order to avoid these problems, reverse supply chain management techniques are used. On order to implement these techniques, reverse supply chain management systems are needed. As this kind of systems are almost inexistent, this article suggests the adaptation of the traditional WMS systems in order to be useful in the management of the reverse supply chain management. The proposed methodology shows that the major functions found in present WMS systems can also be used for reverse supply chain management.
Information Technology; Logistics; Reverse Logistics; Supply Chain
