Evaluating barriers for reverse logistics implementation under a multiple stakeholders' perspective analysis using grey decision making approach

In the past few decades, an interest in reverse logistics has attracted the attention of industries and also has become a subject of interest for researchers. However, while reverse logistics is becoming a mandatory element of the supply chain in developed countries particularly due to legislation issues, the subject is still in a state of infancy in emerging economies such as Brazil. In these connections, impediments to reverse logistics implementation must be considered and analyzed, as well as the many different perspectives from the key stakeholders for their development. The objective of this research is to evaluate the interrelationship among reverse logistics barriers from the perspectives of the most important stakeholders in the Brazilian context. For this purpose, a Multi-Criteria Decision Making tool named grey-based Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (grey-DEMATEL) was used to extract a multiple company-customer-government association perspective. Three respondents - one expert from each stakeholder - have been consulted to obtain the pair-wise comparison of barriers. Thus, both the net effect and the importance level of each impediment are provided by means of a Euclidean distance analysis, as well as the similarities and differences among stakeholders' opinions. The uniqueness of this paper relies on the fact that no previous work was found in the domain of multiple stakeholders' perspective for reverse logistics barriers. This research uncovers that most of the key barriers from the reverse logistics multiple perspectives framework are from the organizational point of view. This stakeholder holds 10 out of 13 key barriers for RL implementation; as such, it is an important outcome because it indicates that firms may begin product return implementation by first tackling key internal barriers. Moreover, knowing the influential factors in their environment may assist industry managers to better implement and manage reverse flows, and to see through current and future green solutions for reverse logistics.