Dead-on-arrival products cause more damage than just return costs and replacements. They disrupt production processes, strain customer relationships and increase the ecological footprint. Through better packaging strategies and chain-wide collaboration, Faes helps companies to prevent these hidden costs on a structural basis.
Summary of this article
A product that arrives to your customer damaged or defective. It sounds like an incident, but in reality it happens more often than you think. Dead-on-Arrival (DOA) is the collective term for products that are immediately unusable upon arrival. The visible costs of such a DOA are usually in the picture: return shipping, replacement, additional transportation or handling.
Yet the real problem runs deeper. The real costs of a DOA are often much higher. Think of disruptions in your planning, production stoppages, extra efforts by your customer service or frustration with your customer. It affects your reliability, your reputation and eventually even your relationship with your client.
To map that hidden impact, Faes and the University of Groningen conducted extensive research into the origins and consequences of DOAs. In this article you will read why DOAs cause them more damage than you probably suspect and how you can prevent this structurally. Not with a better box, but with a better approach.
When a product arrives defective, you often see only the direct costs. These may include sending a replacement, paying additional shipping fees, or issuing a credit note to the customer. However, most of the damage remains invisible. This is what makes DOAs so deceptive. They are not merely logistical incidents, but a hidden cost that quietly erodes your margins year after year.
When a DOA is part of a production line, installation schedule, or operational plan, it causes more than just a delay; it can also result in direct financial losses for the customer. Research shows that DOAs involving critical components can bring entire assembly processes to a standstill or delay scheduled deliveries. These costs are rarely recovered, but they strongly influence how customers perceive your reliability.
A DOA affects more than the transaction itself. It undermines trust in your product, your organisation, and the promises you make. Customer relationships may weaken or even be lost following repeated defective deliveries, especially when the defect could have been prevented through better transport or packaging. In industries where reliability is essential, a DOA can cause lasting damage to your reputation.
A defective product not only causes delays for the customer, but also disrupts your own internal processes. It requires rescheduling, additional communication, replacement, testing, and reshipping. These supply chain disruptions increase the likelihood of further errors later in the process, which can have major consequences in complex logistics networks, such as those used in high-tech assembly.
Every DOA results in additional transport movements, extra packaging waste, and unnecessary product losses. Yet this environmental impact is rarely recorded or taken into account. The research highlights that companies often completely overlook the additional CO₂ emissions caused by return shipments and replacement deliveries.
At a time when ESG reporting and sustainability targets are becoming increasingly important, this represents a missed opportunity. DOAs are therefore not only costly, but also environmentally unsustainable.
DOAs create a trail of additional work throughout the organisation. Customer service must communicate with the customer, warehouse teams must process returns, administration must make corrections, and sales teams must work to restore the customer relationship. The research estimates that a single DOA requires an average of five internal actions, all of which consume valuable capacity that could be used more effectively elsewhere.
Many organisations manage performance based on return rates or first-time-right delivery. However, DOAs are often not recorded separately, which means they remain under the radar. This prevents structural improvement and leads to the underreporting of failure costs.
Most companies do not have a measurable system for analysing DOAs as a separate category. As a result, decision-making regarding preventive measures remains underdeveloped.
Most DOAs do not occur during transportation, but much earlier in the chain. Often the cause is a poor match between product and packaging, a lack of understanding of transportation scenarios or simply the use of generic boxes for specific applications. In a complex supply chain full of changing conditions, that approach doesn’t work. Then you don’t need a supplier, but a partner who oversees the entire packaging process.
That’s where Faes comes in as a packaging partner. Rather than just delivering what is requested, Faes takes responsibility for the big picture. From design and test phase to implementation, monitoring and reuse. This prevents packaging from remaining a closing item, and prevents errors that only become visible at the end of the chain.
As a packaging partner, Faes helps you to:
By working from this directive role, you prevent a defective product from ever having the chance to end up as a DOA with your customer. You increase the reliability of your entire chain, prevent unnecessary costs and show that you have a grip on quality.
Thijs Canjels is Business Innovation Manager at Faes and specializes in packaging management and supply chain optimization. In his blogs, he shares insights on efficiency improvements, cost savings and the strategic role of packaging in modern supply chains.
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