Abstract
Due to the rising awareness of environmental protection and stringent regulations, companies are expected to take more responsibility to protect the environment including collecting and recycling their product. Hence, closed-loop supply chain which not only dealing with the distribution of new products but also collection and recycle of the used products becomes a very important research topic. In addition, many literatures in forward supply chain point out the importance of product design. In this research, we follow the same concept and apply it to closed-loop supply chain, especially how component commonality impact the closed-loop supply chain. We consider two closed-loop supply chain structures, Parallel and Mix. In the Parallel structure, the assembly and disassembly lines are separated while in Mix structure they are performed by the same production line. We study how the usage and the location of common component as well as the degree of delayed differentiation enabled by common component impact the cycle time of forward supply chain under these two structures. We base on the character of component commonality and closed-loop supply chain to address some hypotheses of managerial insights to help managers design their product better using common component in the closed-loop supply chain