Thijs Canjels
Business Innovation Manager
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.
More articles by Thijs CanjelsA 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 only see the direct costs. Think about sending a replacement, extra shipping costs, or a credit note to the customer. But most of the damage remains invisible. That's what makes DOAs insidious. They are not just a logistical incident, but a silent cost that gnaws away at your margin year after year.
When a DOA is part of a production line, installation schedule or operation schedule, it not only causes delays but also direct economic damage to the customer. The research shows that DOAs in critical components can lead to downtime of complete assembly processes or delayed deliveries. These costs are rarely recovered, but they do determine how customers view your reliability.
A DOA affects more than the transaction. It erodes trust in your product, organization and promises. Customer relationships can weaken or even be lost with repeated defect deliveries, especially when the defect could have been prevented during transport or packaging. In industries where reliability counts, a DOA can permanently damage your reputation.
A defective product means not only delay to the customer, but also disruption to your own internal process. Think re-planning, communicating, replacing, testing and shipping. These chain delays increase the likelihood of errors further down the line, something that can have major consequences in complex logistics networks (such as high-tech assembly).
Every DOA leads to duplicate logistics movements, additional packaging waste and unnecessary product losses. Yet almost nowhere is this environmental burden recorded or factored in. The study emphasizes that companies need to account for the extra CO ₂-emissions created by return shipments and replacement deliveries are often completely overlooked. Especially in times when ESG reporting and sustainability goals are becoming increasingly important, this is a missed opportunity. DOAs are thus not only costly, but also environmentally unsustainable.
DOAs pull a trail of extra work through your organization. Customer service has to interface with the customer, warehouses with returns processing, administration with corrections, sales with relationship recovery. The study estimates that one DOA requires an average of five internal actions, actions that all consume capacity you’d rather use elsewhere.
Many organizations drive return rates or first-time-right delivery. But DOAs are often not recorded separately in these, keeping them under the radar. This hinders structural improvement and leads to under-reporting of failure costs. In most companies, there is no measurable system to analyze DOAs separately, leaving prevention decision-making behind.
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 Fourth Party Packaging (4PP) 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 4PP 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.
