Return: the reverse flow, dispositioned

What it is. A return is inventory with options, not waste with paperwork — and SCOR DS structures the Return process around exactly that idea. It covers the reverse flow of goods and services from the customer back through the network: receiving the return, diagnosing its condition, evaluating entitlement, and dispositioning the unit — back into Transform for repair or refurbishment, into other circular activities, or out of the system entirely. The standard connects Return explicitly to circular-supply-chain thinking, which upgrades the process from an afterthought to the place where recovered value and sustainability metrics are actually earned. Return also carries information forward: return reasons, failure patterns, and firmware or lot correlations are quality signals that upstream processes need and rarely receive.

The questions it answers. Why are returns arriving — and is a pattern forming that Source, Transform, or engineering should hear about this week rather than this quarter? What is each returned unit actually worth under each disposition path, condition and entitlement considered? Is the customer made whole quickly enough that the return doesn’t cost the relationship on top of the unit? How much value does the reverse flow recover versus destroy — and how much of it re-enters productive use?

The metrics that matter.

Measure	SCOR DS	What it tells you
Perfect Return Order Fulfillment	RL.1.3	Whether the reverse promise is kept as reliably as the forward one
Diagnostic Cycle Time	RS.3.117	How long a returned unit waits to learn its fate — dead time nobody owns
Value recovery rate	practice measure	The share of unit value the disposition path preserves
Credit cycle time	practice measure	How long the customer waits to be made whole
Reclaimed Products and their Packaging Materials	EV.3.1	What the circular loop actually recaptures, counted

Where the decisions live. Return’s recurring decision is disposition: restock, repair, refurbish, harvest, or scrap — per unit, priced, with entitlement checked rather than assumed. The warranty-wave caselet works a 3× return spike where per-unit disposition recovers 71% of value against roughly 10% for blanket scrap, and where auto-approving small entitled credits cuts the customer’s wait from 21 days to 6. The second decision is the feedback loop: a return spike traced to one firmware version is a quality signal wearing a logistics costume, and routing it to the owning team is part of the process, not a favor.

SCOR is ASCM’s framework; coded metrics reference the SCOR DS quick reference. Uncoded measures are common practice measures.