Interorganisational – Supply Chain Management

This piece from yesterday´s FT demonstrates one but several ways of how reverse logistics activities may be involved in moving desks.

“Last week I gathered up seven years of my working life and threw it away. I filled three plastic sacks of miscellaneous rubbish for landfill sites and one oil drum of paper for recycling and built six tottering towers of books to be sent to Oxfam.“

Here, sorting is carried out, and destination for various end-of-life products are determined.

“Moving meant a major sorting operation. First, I tackled a job I had been putting off for years: opening my mail. My policy is never to open anything unless it looks interesting. The pile of uninteresting mail was therefore very large, some of the envelopes having been posted several years earlier.“

Who is not guilty of such gate-keeping but time-saving activity? What is though interesting here is that this confirms how difficult it is to forecast when and how end-of-life materials enter the reverse supply chain. How often do we not open our mail, but still decide keep it somewhere? How often do we move desks? There are many sources of uncertainty for materials as simple as paper.

“When I started to open them I discovered how right I had been. They contained invitations to dull leadership seminars and press releases about dull surveys. I took an executive decision and slung the rest, unopened, into the oil drum, where it made a reassuring thud. This felt very good.“

Just carry on reading!

“Then the old newspapers and magazines followed. Thud, thud. Next were books, so many management books of so very little interest. The first I picked up was Value Nets, Breaking the Supply Chain to Unlock Hidden Profits. The question was not whether to keep it now but why I had ever kept it at all. About a hundred other titles followed.”

Now, this is why we need “reverse supply chains”

Maybe demand management could solve this problem of reverse logistics?!

Árni