As post-holiday sales give way to rising return volumes, retailers face a familiar challenge: how to process returns efficiently without eroding margins. With peak returns season approaching, Blue Yonder is announcing new Returns Management System (RMS) enhancements designed to help retailers make smarter, faster decisions across the reverse journey, turning returns from a cost center into a value-recovery opportunity.
What’s new in Returns Management
Smart Disposition for intelligent returns routing
At the core of this release is an enhanced Smart Disposition engine, which determines the most profitable disposition path for every returned item. By combining business rules with machine learning (ML)-derived insights, retailers can intelligently route returns to the optimal location—whether that’s a store, distribution center, or recommerce channel. This ensures maximum value recovery while reducing unnecessary handling and waste.
Warehouse returns: a new era of efficiency
There are major enhancements on warehouse returns capabilities, enabling retailers to handle high volumes with greater speed and accuracy—including:
- Allows for bulk receipt and automated sorting integration to streamline large volumes of returns intake, reducing processing time and labor costs.
- Mobile returns processing feature adds flexibility and ease for operations, making it ideal for big and bulky items that don’t fit traditional workbench workflows.
- New recommerce and liquidation workflows are integrated to recover greater value from returned inventory.
- Returns analytics enhancements transform data captured during the returns process into actionable insights, helping retailers make strategic decisions to reduce returns and improve future buying.
These enhancements are natively integrated with Blue Yonder’s Cognitive Warehouse Management System (WMS), ensuring tighter orchestration across orders, warehouses, and Smart Disposition. This cohesive approach accelerates processing speed, improves disposition accuracy, and scales effortlessly across channels and volumes.
ML-predicted resale value to maximize recovery
New ML capabilities assess the resale potential of returned items, enabling retailers to send products to the destination that offers the highest recovery value. This data-driven approach ensures that every return contributes to revenue recovery while minimizing waste.
Configurable refund rules to balance cost and experience
Retailers can now implement rules within their returns initiation journey to manage costs associated with serial returners while rewarding valuable customers. For example, targeted return charges can mitigate costs, while instant refunds can enhance the experience for loyal shoppers.
Best-in-class returns, strengthened by Optoro
These enhancements build on Blue Yonder’s growing returns portfolio following the Optoro acquisition, bringing together advanced decisioning, reverse logistics expertise, and omnichannel execution into a single, integrated offering. By combining Optoro’s trusted returns optimization technology with Blue Yonder’s end-to-end supply chain solutions, retailers benefit from a more cohesive returns strategy that scales across channels and volumes.
Rethinking returns as a strategic advantage
With these new capabilities, Blue Yonder is empowering retailers to move beyond reactive returns handling. By leveraging Smart Disposition, advanced warehouse returns functionality, and ML-driven insights, retailers can unlock smarter recovery, lower costs, and stronger margins across the reverse supply chain.
