Product Recovery Option Evaluation for Different Departmental Objectives via Fuzzy AHP

Product recovery has an important role in providing a sustainable environment and economy. Reuse, refurbishment, repair, remanufacturing, and recycling are some of the recovery options considered within the decision process of the product recovery system. Since each recovery option has different monetary and non-monetary effects on the system, evaluation of the options is important to minimize the total cost. Rental products make up a special subset of recovery products because their lifecycle takes a long time, and they have many returns. Additionally, the effect of the same recovery option changes with respect to the type of department in a company as their own targets differs from each other. Hence, it becomes important to determine the recovery option evaluation factors and their importance weights concerning different departments such as purchasing, sales, marketing, customer relations, and so on. For this purpose, an application is performed in a telecommunication company. Modems that are used as rental products in the company are considered within the recovery process. The factors used in the evaluation of various recovery options are revealed and their importance weights are obtained via the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) method for the marketing and customer relations departments of the company. It is concluded that the importance weights of the evaluation factors for recovery options vary with respect to the type of department.