I'd like to throw this out for you guys for your thoughts. I was performing a review of RMA's to come up with some trends(area for improvements), and discovered that some of the RMA's weren't actually returns from customers.

The product never physically left the building, however, the job was closed out prior to shipping. It could be that an issue came up prior to actually shipping the product to the customer (that dead zone between mfg and shipping, or shipping and it physically leaving). Then an RMA would be generated from inside sales to receive the material back into stock and a new order would be placed for the correct amount.

This inflated my number of RMA's and the RMA $ amount. This gave an unrealistic picture of my returns and what the real problem is.

Unfortunately, our excellent system (oracle) works this way. There is no way once it has shipped systematically to bring it back into the system without generating and RMA. Then the paperwork needs to go back through accounting and they make the changes.

I met with management and came up with the idea of creating a mirror system that would be called Internal Transaction Return.

(am I making too much of this here???)

Where instead of an RMA it would be an ITR with a different form for accounting. I think it would solve the issue of RMA's and I would see a more clear picture.


thoughts???

Makes sense.

Alternately, you could clearly define RMAs to include ITRs, and provide management with a new term for the subset of RMAs that aren't ITRs. Then they'd have to learn to focus managerially on the new term, not on RMAs.

I'd think that which would be easier would be determined by the balance between configurability of the software systems vs. educability of the managers involved.

more thanks has been added to you because as reading your post all I can think of is "exactly!"

thank you!!:agree:

Or you could just include ITR on your Pareto Analysis with all the other causes.

It can then be ignored or actioned as managers see fit.

Our biggest scrap cause is "warm up", some feel nothing can be done about it, other feel a multi million dollar cost deserves at least an investigation.

ITR might not be an RMA, but it surely is a cost.

Oracle - do it their way or do what you need outside their system in Excel.