from the conferences organized by TANGER Ltd.
The main purpose of this case study is to identify processes of knowledge management, information and communication technology (ICT) support, and reverse logistics and relations between them in a studied enterprise. Moreover, this study attempts to describe approaches and methods used for performance evaluation of identified processes. Although ICT support of reverse logistics was previously studied to some extent, the relations to knowledge management and performance evaluation in the reverse logistics context have not been investigated. Therefore, this study tries to fill this gap and introduce the possible directions for further research and testing. For an analysis, manufacturing enterprise with approximately 1300 employees located in the Czech Republic was chosen according to results of previous explorative quantitative survey. The reasons of choosing this company were twofold. Firstly, the head of the logistics department (respondent of the survey) was willing to provide initial interview and facilitated the access to company. Secondly, the company (as only one from the few) is supporting reverse logistics processes intensively with ICT, is evaluating ICT support performance and is involved in knowledge management initiatives. Thus, the company serves as a good starting point for in-depth analysis and description of the best practices. Semi-structured interviews with the head of logistics department, human resource department and IT department were conducted. Interviews were analyzed with qualitative data analysis, namely content analysis. The case study reveals potential mechanisms how knowledge management, ICT support and reverse logistics are affecting each other.
Keywords: Knowledge management, performance evaluation, information systems, case study, reverse logistics.© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.