Don’t Get Stuck in Reverse: When Is It Time to Evaluate Your Reverse Logistics Practices?

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Tom DeVroy Reverse logistics is becoming an integral part of operations for manufacturers, distributors and service providers to minimize lost revenue when moving products, parts and sub-components back into inventory. Recent Statista research shows that goods returns cost $246.3bn per year in North America and must span customers, service organizations, supply chains, receiving departments and even a repair depot operations or subcontractors. In order to minimize lost revenue, organizations need to assess their approach to reverse logistics. Here, I outline three common reverse logistics scenarios. If these ring true then it may be time to evaluate whether your reverse logistics strategy is costing you time, money and customer satisfaction. No. 1 – Do you deploy technicians and support assets in the field? The field service process alone includes multiple reverse logistics steps. The technician pulls a component out of a repairable piece of equipment at the customer site and replaces it with a part out of his truck inventory. In a situation where the technician does not have a spare part and cannot, an inventory order will need to be placed. The field technician will need complete visibility of whether the part is under warranty or if the customer is entitled to special pricing as a result of a contractual commitment. Without an integrated end to end service platform, you would be relying on a technician to communicate with separate field service, reverse logistics, warranty management, contracts and installed base systems to get the answers he or she needs. Obviously, some type of communication between field service and reverse logistics software is necessary if only to prevent losing track of parts or components pulled from customer equipment in the field. But in these situations, there needs to be a seamless way to track whether or not the part is […]