In 2015, the return delivery costs amounted to around 246 billion U.S. dollars in North America alone and global return costs of over 600 billion U.S. dollars.
Reverse logistics is the process including the return movement of goods away from their final destination to capture value or proper disposal.
Over the past few years, the reverse logistics industry is witnessing robust challenges in terms of low margins, high operation costs, and a shortage of talent. As a result, firms in the reverse logistics industry are planning to streamline their service capabilities to enhance delivery performance and increase customer satisfaction levels. Additionally, with the rising demand for one-stop solutions, firms are entering mergers and acquisitions to tap potential markets and enhance their functional capabilities. Furthermore, the growth of reversed logistics industry can be attributed to factors such as globalization, robust GDP growth, and increasing foreign direct investments.
However, a few factors are expected to influence the growth of the reverse logistics industry in the coming years. These factors include:
- Improving efficiency: It is essential for the businesses in the reverse logistics space to leverage the use of innovative technological capabilities to streamline their work and deliver efficiency. This is because the industry is witnessing competition with the presence of several competitors. With the help of advanced software, firms can become much more productive and offer reliable services to the customers.
- Tracking warranty: Today, companies in the reverse logistics space are facing challenges in tracking the warranty of the products as reverse logistics involves the process of replacing commodities directly from the customers. Additionally, in case of third party repair by an OEM, it is essential for companies to track secondary warranties and generate appropriate claims for the warranty services offered.
Many such factors are compelling reverse logistics industry players to leverage the use of competitive intelligence solutions. Competitive intelligence solutions
help firms identify and profile the major competitors across the industry and generate meaningful insights to enable informed decision-making.
The Business Challenge
- The client: A renowned reverse logistics provider
The client, a leading reverse logistics provider with business units spread across the globe, wanted to profile the key competitors and benchmark their pricing plans. Additionally, the client wanted to understand the prevailing competition to benchmark their products, accordingly allocate resources to meet the business requirements, and enhance their competitiveness across the market.
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Our Journey
The competitive intelligence experts at Infiniti carried out extensive research comprising interviews and discussions with prominent stakeholders in reverse logistics space to help the client enhance their competitiveness across the market. The experts also compiled information across a wide array of reliable sources such as trade shows, paid industry databases, and company presentations to help the client formulate effective business strategies.
The Solution Benefit and the Business Impact
With the help of Infiniti’s competitive intelligence solution, the reverse logistics client gained actionable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the competitors and identified their unique selling propositions. Additionally, the client identified the gaps in terms of their capabilities and performance and ranked their business against the major competitors. This helped the client successfully launch and market new services across the industry.
The Future
Firstly, for reverse logistics, the use of self-driving trucks is going to revolutionize the transportation of materials from distribution center to retail outlet in the near future. Secondly, there will soon be a technology revolution with regards to the processing of returns. Both these developments are going to change how large companies are going to conduct their logistics and reverse logistics.
