INSTRUCTIONS: 1. Read the case study below 2. Create a report with your team to answer the questions at the end of the case study. 3. Word limit is 500750 words 4. Include a Title page with your group information - student names and ID's. 5. Include a References section at the end to show your research work. OM in the News: Restocking Inventory and Supply Chain Snarls DECEMBER 29, 2021 tags: inventory, , pandemic , restocking by Barry Render Find what you needed this year? It might be because you got someone else's return. More retailers are working to quickly get like-new returned items back into their systems for sale. Writes The Wall Street Journal (Dec. 28, 2021). They are hoping to fill shelves and websites, as supply-chain snarls limit the availability of some new inventorv. and reduce the :ost of handling returns overall. a bigger expense in recent years as e-commerce sales climb. Aproduct sold online is more likely to be returned than one purchased in a store where a shopper can see and touch it first. Retailers are investing in automation. software and new warehouse systems that help cut the time it takes for returned products to become salable inventory. American Eagle focused on streamlining returns last year after the pandemic shut down stores. the company's main return channel. That strategy has paid off. as supply-chain problems this year delayed shipments of some of the company's bestselling products. The company set up more warehouses to receive. clean and repackage returns. and employed new technology to gauge product demand to determine in advance which items are worth fasttracking back onto shelves. Returning a product to shelves. depending on its priority status. now takes the chain 6 days. down from 14 days before. and costs around half as much. Gap took a sales hit of around $300 million this quarter because supply-chain disruptions led to a lack of inventory. The retailer has focused on more efficiently_processing returns during the pandemic when e-commerce sales surged and physical stores closed. Gap recently added new automation that helps return, rroducts to "in stock" within an hour of arrival at a warehouse, yersus a couple of days with the previously manualprocess. Walmart has been returning more like-new items to shelves as well as looking for ways to sell gently used products. Walmart already. sells refurbished electronics on its website and in some stores, both to become more efficient and help reach the company's sustainability geals. In the past, returns were an afterthought. "Just a last thing to be processed and it takes a while to get back to in-stock or just goes to close out sale. With the supply chain issues, we've been working with them to see returns as part of their inventory" said one CEO. CASE STUDY questions: 1. Why are returns more important than in the past? 2. What can firms do to make the return process more efficient? 3. What are some other challenges that these companies are facing with their supply chains? Make sure you include References (website source, article source) at the end of your report. Do NOT copy and paste; use your own words to describe the challenges