Quality control in remanufacturing: Distinguishing features and techniques

Abstract

Considering the existing amount of work on quality control in manufacturing companies, this work analyses its applicability to remanufacturing systems. After reviewing different quality control methods, we describe the distinguishing features of remanufacturing compared to manufacturing systems, such as increased variability of key remanufacturing inputs; the definition of customer requirements was done by a third party; customer requirements may be obsolete; and key product/process characteristics may need to be updated. Then, we conclude that existing quality planning and control techniques can be transferred to the remanufacturing domain. It ends by suggesting ways to assess the resulting quality control based on quality costs and identifies future research directions.