Supply Chain & Logistics
Returns grading and disposition decisions
Decide the best disposition for each returned item — restock, refurbish, discount channel, liquidate, recycle — using condition assessment, current demand, and the recovery value of each route.
10–25%
improvement in value recovered per return
Opportunity assessment
Moderate impact. Meaningful cost or revenue improvement, likely noticeable at function level but modest relative to total business scale.
Moderate effort. Requires configuration, prompt engineering, and testing. A capable team can get there but expect several months.
Moderate data needs. Works with data most businesses hold, but will likely need consolidation, cleaning, or reformatting before use.
Low risk. Limited external exposure. A human reviews output before it reaches anyone outside the team.
Moderate people impact. Part of someone's working day changes. Requires training and some adjustment time, but roles remain broadly the same.
Tooling required
Things to consider
Most returns operations apply a fixed rule per category, which is right on average and wrong on every individual item. Deciding per item against live demand is where the recovery uplift comes from.
Condition assessment by vision is reliable for packaging and obvious damage and unreliable for function. Keep functional testing manual for categories where it matters.
Speed of disposition matters as much as the decision. An item routed correctly six weeks later has already lost the seasonal value the decision was protecting.
Experiment starter: Run item-level disposition on one high-return category for a month alongside your existing rule. Compare realised recovery value per unit, including the handling cost of each route.
Go deeper in the playbook
Section — Opportunity Identification, including the AI Opportunity Assessment ScorecardSection — RAG and Knowledge Systems: Unlocking Proprietary DataThis is an decision support opportunity — see the relevant playbook section for how to approach it.More in Supply Chain & Logistics
Supplier document review
Review supplier contracts, compliance certificates, and T&Cs against standard requirements. Flags gaps and deviations for procurement team review.
Purchase order exception handling
Identify anomalies in PO data — price variances, quantity mismatches, missing references — and route to the right team with context and suggested resolution.
Demand pattern summarisation
Convert sales, stock, and forward-order data into plain-language summaries for planning meetings. Identifies trends, spikes, and cover risks.
AI Transformation Playbook
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