RMA

The number exists so that a parcel arriving at a dock can be matched to a decision already taken: who is returning what, under which claim, and what was agreed. Without it, returns arrive as anonymous boxes and get handled twice.

An RMA process is measured on the whole path, not the issuing of the number: how long from request to authorisation, from arrival to diagnosis, from diagnosis to resolution. Most of the elapsed time usually sits in the second gap, waiting for someone to open the box.

For a refurbisher, returns are not an edge case. A device sold with a warranty can come back, and the return rate is one of the numbers a buyer of refurbished equipment will ask about before signing.

The diagnosis that matters is the distinction between no fault found, a genuine defect of the repair, a component that failed later, and a customer expectation that the grading did not set correctly. Those four have different causes and different fixes, and a process that records them as one number cannot tell you which is growing.