A supply chain model under return policy considering refurbishment, learning effect and inspection error

This article presents a three-echelon supply chain model consisting of a supplier, manufacturer, and a retailer, considering the return contract between the manufacturer and the retailer. Here, the manufacturer has two adjacent production units - the main production unit and a refurbishment unit. The main production unit of the manufacturer is imperfect, which produces an admixture of perfect and defective items. He inspects all the products immediately after production and sells good quality items to the retailer. The retailer receives a proportion of faulty products from him due to his erroneous inspection process, which he returns after inspection. The manufacturer sends all the defective products received from the retailer and the main production unit to the refurbishment unit for reworking. Moreover, the learning effect of the employees on the production cost is considered. Under these circumstances, the cost functions of each of the supply chain players have been derived. Finally, the applicability of the proposed model has been shown using a numerical example. The sensitivity analysis has been presented to study the effect of the parameters on the optimum decision variables.