Efficient Closure of Material and Component Loops — Substance Flow Oriented Supply Chain Management

The creation of closed supply chains is increasingly becoming an essential challenge for companies in the electronics industry. On the one hand, manufacturers worldwide are assuming more and more expanded product stewardship for their equipment as a result of new laws and directives. On the other hand, the formation of substance flow oriented supply chains offers a range of opportunities for enterprises, including the establishment of a

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and the exploitation of new market segments. Furthermore, recovery systems offer manufacturers additional procurement sources of materials and product components, e.g. for spare parts management. Accordingly, the objective of the BMBF funded research project

StreaM — Substance Flow Oriented Closed Loop Supply Chain Management in the Electrical and Electronic Equipment Industry

was the provision of strategic and operational planning tools for a substance flow oriented and cross-utilisation phase, boundary independent supply chain management in the electronic industry via the proper further development of existing information systems. The concepts and methods developed in the project were applied within the scope of extensive case studies on-site at the Agfa-Gevaert AG and Electrocycling GmbH industrial partners and the results presented in this paper. In this context, approaches were developed as to how the designed information concept can be implemeted into the corporate environment of these stakeholders. The focus here was the development of a company-independent procedure for creating and using recycling passports, which is published by the

Deutsches Institut für Normung e. V

(German Institute for Standardisation) in the form of a PAS (Publicly Available Specifications). The benefits of the operative planning tool for recycling companies were illustrated by means of a recycling and recovery planning process for a sample used medical-technical device produced by Agfa-Gevaert AG (ADC 70). It could be demonstrated that deployment of the planning tool in conjunction with the use of the recycling passport as data input (i.e. as a means of providing information) enables a more accurate calculation in regards to the device recycling and the recovery of its components. Closure of material supply loops was made possible by the re-use of product components as spare parts. Within the scope of the dismantling experiments at Electrocycling GmbH, the product components targeted by Agfa-Gevaert AG were able to be recovered for the ADC 70 sample device. As a result of the analysis, an expanded recycling passport was developed to facilitate the recovery of spare parts. The implementation of the business processes developed in the project for the integrated planning of spare parts management and recycling were presented using the example of the order co-ordination process.