Abstract
Today reusable containers, widely used in closed loops in production environments, are cleaned irrespective of their cleanliness-status and thus the actual necessity for being cleaned. This often leads to a considerable degree of technically superfluous container-cleaning, associated with high costs, transport efforts and resource utilization. This paper aims at investigating ways to harness the savings potential of a necessity based triggering of the cleaning process amid securing the quality of the container supply, controlling the uncertainty introduced into the container-loops through the status-dependent triggering of cleaning and establishing a process transparency enabling a reduction of the overall container inventory. A case study performed in an automotive supplier is included.