Back in the good old days (read the summer of 1999), I was introduced to a music and movie club from Columbia House or the BMG Music Service. You may remember the way it worked: They send you eight CDs of music or movies for a penny. Then they continue to send you titles, and you decide to keep them or send them back within 10 days. If you don’t send them back, your credit card is charged. And, of course, they keep sending you more—to get the free ones, you need to buy a certain number at the full retail price.
I was a young professional, trying to learn everything I could about technology and supply chain, and so I found that my friends and I had little time to watch and listen. My roommates and I spent our time working. We were like a lot of people: We didn’t have time to watch the movies and so we sent them back. It got me to thinking about the process that is necessary to process high level of returns. It would have to be agile, slick and fast to process the massive number of returns.
Retailers, distributors, and e-tailers all recognize that product returns are a necessary evil. Everyone hates it, from operations to IT to consultants, because processing returns tends to require manual intervention. Until recently, a person had to visually examine the product to determine the final disposition of it.
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