Research: Integrating flow of product returns and customer orders can lead to considerable savings in costs

In today’s e-commerce continuous technological development, high competition, and especially high service standard requirements pose major challenges for logistics operations. Significant return rates have become common for many companies and can, depending on the product category, be very high. In warehouses these returned products need to be unpacked, inspected, and re-integrated in the warehouse stock before they can be resold.
In her dissertation at VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands Susanne Wruck shows that when product returns arrive at the warehouse next to customer orders, there is a potential to save labor costs by integrating the two flows in warehouse processes.
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