Why Mattel’s Reverse Logistics Team Gets All the Resources They Need by Paul Rupnow Editor, Reverse Logistics Professional Report While the Reverse Logistics teams at most companies are resource strapped and operating on shoestring budgets, Nancy Maclean’s team at Mattel gets all the resources she needs. Maclean and her team have developed a very effective program to monitor, manage and prevent Returned Goods. Their work has resulted in a reduction in Mattel’s cost of defective returns by over 50% over the last 5 years. For a large company like Mattel, with brands like Barbie, American Girl, Hot Wheels and Fisher Price, any reduction in product return costs can add up to a significant impact in profitability. Maclean, the Director of Warranty Returns and Analysis, has kindly outlined some of her key elements to successful Reverse Logistics at Mattel. The company and her team have to be very creative about their solutions to handle product returns, since there is a wide range of products; some very low tech inexpensive items such as a Hot Wheels car, some higher tech electronics items such as the Uno Attack electronic card shooter and some very expensive products such as hand painted collectors edition Barbie dolls. Her key elements are outlined below and there are some great lessons, tactics and best practices for all reverse logistics teams. Reliable Data Collection – When a customer wishes to return a Mattel product, they often take the products back to the retailer where they purchased the units. Since it is often too expensive to have all returned products shipped back to the company for analysis, Mattel works with the retailers to either: 1. Provide them with a credit allowance to cover the cost of returned products, or 2. Collect the returns for Mattel to validate, issue credit and perform further analysis. Mattel is unable to collect return data from all of