Remanufacturing often seems a sensible approach for companies looking to adopt sustainable business
plans to achieve long term success. However, remanufacturing must not be treated as a panacea for
achieving a sustainable business, as issues such as market demand, product design, end of life condition
and information uncertainty can affect the success of a remanufacturing endeavour. Businesses therefore
need to carefully assess the feasibility of adopting remanufacturing before committing to a particular
activity or strategy. To aid this decision process, a number of tools and techniques have been published by
academics. However, there is currently not a formal review and comparison of these tools and how they
relate to the decision process.
The main research objective of this study has therefore been to identify tools and methods which have
been developed within academia to support the decision process of assessing and evaluating the viability
of conducting remanufacturing, and evaluate how they have met the requirements of the decision stage.
This has been achieved by conducting a content analysis. Three bibliographic databases were searched
(Compendex, Web of Science and Scopus) using a structured keyword search to identify relevant literature.
The identified tools were then split into 6 categories based upon the specific decision stages and
applications, then evaluated against a set of key criteria which are, the decision factors (economic,
environmental, social) and the inclusion of uncertainty. The key finding of this study has been that
although decision factors are generally well covered, operational tools and the use of uncertainty are
often neglected
