Lean, Agile, and Green Supply Chain Practices for Superior Performance in Recommerce: An Empirical Study

Abstract

Consumers today are becoming increasingly conscious and careful of their purchase decisions and firms are responding to the environment and corporate responsibility. These emerging purchase patterns are rapidly popularizing the recommerce industry, which recycles and refurbishes products to resell to consumers. As it is a relatively emerging industry, little to no research has been done on it on an industry level and much less from a supply chain perspective, especially in the case of Bangladesh. To understand the detailed nature and paradigms of the supply chain of recommerce, this article aims to explore the modalities of the supply chain of the recommerce industry, find traits and patterns among their practices, and explore the existence and intensity of lean, agile and green supply chain traits embedded in them. The study adopts a qualitative method building on empirical evidence and it relies on a mix of primary and secondary data. Key-informant interview (KII) tool and a semi-structured questionnaire method have been adopted to collect empirical data. Analyzing the in-depth interviews, the article examines how these recommerce firms have integrated lean, agile, and green supply characteristics into their supply chains to improve their operational efficiency.