Older AT Kearney articles are no longer available. If you click through you will be taken to the Internet Archive site to find an archived copy.
“Satisfaction guaranteed” is still promised by many retailers today. But what happens to those returned products? How do the retailer and the manufacturer handle them? Both have traditionally focused on delivering goods to customers, not on managing their return in an efficient manner. The handling of returned products, often called reverse logistics, is an often-neglected part of an otherwise efficient supply chain.
Pressures to improve customer service and satisfaction and demands from environmental groups are just a few of the factors pushing reverse logistics higher up on the supply chain agenda. And for good reason: Efficient reverse supply chains can mean happier customers and higher profits. Many companies, however, still consider reverse logistics to be of relatively low importance.
In this article, the authors discuss why reverse logistics is such a significant issue and offer suggestions for reducing the need for returns and improving the reverse logistics supply chain.
Authors: Charles Harthan, Patrick Van den Bossche, Sean Monahan
Source: Kearney
Subject: Operations
Click to Add the First »