Reverse Logistics: Reimagining the supply chain
The rise of e-commerce has opened a world of possibilities for businesses, connecting them with global customers and expanding their reach like never before. However, this sea of opportunities also brings with it waves of challenges, one of the most prominent the management of the returned items.
In the case of e-commerce, online purchases, which are three times more likely to be returned than in-store purchases, generate a tsunami of reverse logistics. Processing, sorting, revaluing, and reintegrating returned products becomes a titanic task that directly impacts sustainability, profitability, and customer satisfaction.
Reverse logistics refers to the process of efficiently managing the flow of products from the customer back to the manufacturer or point of origin. While traditionally associated with returns management, reverse logistics encompasses a broader range of activities, including repair, refurbishment, recycling, and the proper disposal of products. It is an essential component of the supply chain that seeks to minimize waste, optimize resource utilization, and promote sustainable practices.
Reverse logistics is fundamental to promoting sustainability by reducing waste through reuse and recycling, which decreases pollution and the need for new resources. Additionally, by properly managing waste and complying with environmental regulations, companies avoid legal risks and improve their public image, standing out as responsible and sustainable to society.
Business challenges in reverse logistics
Reverse logistics presents several challenges for businesses:
- Operational Complexity: Managing returns and retrieving returned products involves additional logistical processes that can be complex and costly for retailers.
- Inventory Management: Returns can create inventory uncertainty, making demand planning difficult and increasing the risk of excess or shortage of inventory.
- Additional Costs: Handling returns and managing returned products can generate significant costs in terms of transportation, storage, and labor.
- Environmental Impact: The environmental impact of waste, inadequate management of obsolete materials, and the lack of recycling strategies are a growing concern for retailers, their customers, and society at large.
However, these challenges also present opportunities to optimize the supply chain, reduce costs, improve customer experience, build an environmentally responsible brand, and generate a positive impact on the community.
30,000 Items/hour with Smartsorter
A Technology that successfully overcomes these challenges
Within our internal logistics process automation solutions, we have a robotic sorting system that is particularly useful for e-commerce and reverse logistics activities, due to its ability to manage large volumes of goods.
This intelligent solution is designed to adapt to a wide range of scenarios and sectors, offering unprecedented flexibility and efficiency. Particularly effective in industries such as postal services, pharmaceuticals, supermarkets and bookstores, this technology enables companies to optimise their logistics and distribution processes.
Smartsorter is an innovative system for accurately sorting small and medium-sized items. Our solution uses small robots that move on a platform to automatically sort products. The items are placed in a 3D station, which deposits products in different boxes, thus completing the orders. It consists of several parts, including the table platform, the 3D sorting robot, the robotic sorting system, and the conveyor system. Thanks to its high flexibility the number of robots can be increased or reduced as required, making it possible to arrange more sorting chutes. This enables an effective response to considerable sorting traffic demands.
Additionally, for retail companies, such as pharmaceutical distributors, where there are return policies for expired or soon-to-expire products to laboratories, this system provides greater efficiency, accuracy and flexibility, reducing costs in sorting by batch and expiry date, labour and space.
In the case of companies with Distribution Centres and branches, sending from these to the Distribution Centers for sorting tasks is one of the critical points where our solutions allow our customers to reduce reception and control times, reduce costs of destruction of obsolete merchandise, as well as minimize losses due to not arriving on time with the suppliers’ change policies.
Uninterrupted workflow
The order management system automatically scans the items to be sorted and assigns them to the 3D grid. The robots place the goods in a tilting tray and transport them to the most efficient route to their destination. The tilting tray delivers the goods to the corresponding place of the order. When a shelf is classified, a green indicator lights up. Filled shelves are removed from the sorter and sent to the packaging process or the necessary locations within a reverse logistics process. Empty shelves can be placed at any time, waiting for the next sorting round. There is also the option to continue directly with the next round, allowing for an uninterrupted workflow.
- 2 to 5 times higher efficiency vs. traditional.
- Multiple configurations and levels.
- More than 30,000 items/hour.
- Fast implementation (even less than a month).
- Sustainable: reduces carbon footprint and promotes ergonomics.
- Versatile: small, medium, irregular products…
- Extremely fast ROI.
- Accuracy of 99.9% and availability close to 100%.
- Training time for a new operator on how to use the system is only 5 minutes.
Smartlog: Your strategic ally in reverse logistics
At Smartlog, we position ourselves as a strategic ally for companies looking to optimise reverse logistics and achieve their business objectives. We offer innovative technology solutions that enable retailers to navigate this new landscape successfully, improving both operational efficiency and environmental impact.
In addition to solutions such as Smartsorter for high-volume product sorting and order management, we offer our expertise as an independent engineering integrator in connecting systems and components to keep operations running smoothly.
A good design for the automation of logistics work in an industrial plant involves, first, a prior and detailed analysis of information, material and financial flows, and, based on this study, the integration of systems, assets and processes with software that offers interoperability with the company’s ERP and management systems.
