An integrated BWM–SWARA approach to identify barriers in implementing reverse logistics for an effective supply chain management: a critical study of five bottle manufacturing companies in Odisha (India)

The concept of reverse logistics has been well established in developed countries as compared to the developing countries. However, the implementation of reverse logistics in some of the companies in India finds difficulties owing to different barriers. Thus, this study primarily focussed on identifying the barriers to implement reverse logistics for an effective supply chain management in five bottle manufacturing companies located in Odisha state in India. Data were collected by the use of designed questionnaire from 154 employees followed by subsequent analysis with statistical analysis, and further, the barriers were ranked based on their preferences by the use of an integrated approach of both “Best Worst Method (BWM) and Step-wise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis (SWARA)”. Out of a total of 48 barriers in the questionnaire, 40 barriers were identified to be more significant under five prevailing-factors or “Barriers’ Related Factor (BRF)”, such as “Economic-Barriers (EB); Informational-Barriers (IB); Laws, Regulations and Policies based Barriers (LRPB); Management and Infrastructural Barriers (MIB); and Environmental-Barriers (ENVB)”; respectively. The BWM method was used to rank the dominant-factors representing the reverse logistics based barriers (RLBs) with the calculation of optimized weight values of the factors, while the SWARA method was utilized to rank the concerned RLBs by considering the respective factor’s optimized weight values to calculate the final weight values of respective RLBs. The finding of this research will provide a guide-way to the professional and other decision-makers to plan for appropriate resolutions of these barriers for implementing reverse logistics in a more successful manner.