An evaluation of capacity planning techniques in a remanufacturing environment

Remanufacturing is a growing segment of the manufacturing industry, aided by environmental greening initiatives. There is scant literature on how to manage operations in this emerging industry segment. In this study, an important component of the manufacturing planning and control function, capacity planning is analysed. It is shown that the remanufacturing environments characteristics are sufficiently different from the traditional new product manufacturing environments that production planning and control techniques need to be different. New capacity planning techniques are developed and implemented along with some standard capacity planning techniques in a remanufacturing environment. The results show that the new techniques, developed for the remanufacturing environment are significantly better than the standard techniques, which had been developed for the traditional new product manufacturing environment.