LoadProof Video Testimonial – Kelsey Hensley

Yeah, you know I don’t want to waste you know too much time so thank you for taking the time to you know join this uh call. I mean no, um, you know I just want to um, you know I hear you know right we create the product for up, you know people like yourself, uh that have challenges, uh you know proving that you guys did your job right. Uh, in a 3PL world it’s even more challenging, uh so you know if you could be a please you know share you know what was the problem you guys originally had and then how has Loadproof, you know, solved that problem for you. You know how is your life better and so forth? I mean if you could please start with a you know small introduction of your business, you know that’ll be great we can go from there.

Okay, um now are you recording this or you’re just gonna use this as a written testimonial? I’m recording this is that okay? I mean we’ll, yeah, okay yeah that’s fine. Um, is this background okay? Yeah, yeah oh the background is perfectly fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah um okay so you just want to request again what you’re looking for? Yeah, I mean my name is Puga Sankara, right? I’m the principal with this company, uh Smart Gladiators and we started, uh you know Loadproof. We created the product Loadproof, you know, working with you know Kenko Logistics and so forth.

Uh, so I mean you know at the end of the day, right, I mean you know we want to make sure that you know not only one is, uh, you know you guys are spending money and putting a lot of effort and using the system so one is, you know, it’s solving the problem, you know for you guys, right? Um, I want to make sure that you know we are, you know, really accomplishing that for you guys. I mean you are not only taking the time, energy and you know putting the effort and I know using the system and you’re paying for it so at the end of the day you know I want to make sure you know you’re happy with the product and it’s really adding value, right? That’s the most important thing so how is that adding value and you know what is your scenario and what was the challenge you guys had?

You know how is your life better now and also you know what else we can do, right? That’s what that’s the most important thing at the end of the day, you know you can sell all you want it’s not about selling and running away but you know giving a product, you know and I’ve been to 200 plus warehouses that’s my no previous life I implemented you know WMS systems when I was working for Manhattan Associates they’re also here in Atlanta. So you know I I’m passionate about you know people like yourself on the warehouse, you know, um dealing with all the struggles and you know so you know part of the mission is also making a life better for you know people on the warehouse floor.

So I’m excited to you know hear from you know real user especially from a, you know, executive level, uh you know leader right how is it working for you, you know how is it solving your problems? I understand 3PM right it’s very scrappy business sometimes, you know sometimes, you know you got to be very creative to you know get it done in a very lean fashion and you know we empathize with you guys, right? So you know that’s uh, you know that’s why we created the product and we are looking at all possible ways to you know get it out there so anybody can take advantage of it. So you know and part of that is you know really hearing from the end user and you know that’s at the executive level is it really, you know helping, um, you know adding value at the bottom line, you know to your bottom line and you know making, uh your life better, right making um, you know life better for your end users on the floor.

Right, so that’s why I’m you know I want to, uh and we do that with, uh you know all our customers. I mean we want to do it with every single customer watch but not everybody shows up and they have the time and all that, right? So I know thank you for you know making time for this, right this feedback helps us a lot. Absolutely, yeah, um so we are 3PL and so our situation is that you know we’re fulfilling orders for our customers. There’s not a lot of margin in it we don’t own the product so we’re providing a service but in the event that you know we over-ship or we under-ship, um we do have to make it right.

Yeah, the biggest thing, biggest challenge we have is with over shipments. Getting the product back to us that is an extra, extra expense. It’s an expense that we don’t have the margin to absorb so it becomes very expensive, correct? Um and so you know the first step is being more accurate but then the second step is having something in place to prove when you are accurate that you know just because your customer rejected this doesn’t mean it falls on us or just because your customer claimed a shortage, you know it left here. And so what Loadproof does is it enables us to have these pictures, you know, stored by the order to be able to pull them up and send them to the customer um and show you know what we actually shipped.

Now sometimes it, you know, doesn’t show things in our favor and that’s an internal struggle that we have to work through um but just having access to those pictures is helpful. Having a place to store them, getting them off of people’s phones, you know not having to deal with um well this person no longer works here and they took the photos. Well, so you know it’s covered there. Um, so it’s been very helpful from that standpoint, okay okay great. So what was the you know problem before and how has your life improved, you know, because of Loadproof?

So the problem was before was you know a customer says that you know an end customer says they didn’t get the the shipment arrives and something short. Yeah, well without photos you know we have no way of proving that well we did ship everything maybe it got lost in transit maybe they’ve received it incorrectly whatever the reason may be for a shortage to exist. Yeah, um we have to have photos to prove that it didn’t start here, okay? And in doing that we, you know, are able to show how it left here um and prove that the picture or that the product left the way it was supposed to.

Okay, um what we’re running into before is you know everyone’s got a phone, correct? People were taking pictures of shipments but say someone doesn’t work here anymore are they damaged to their phone or you know they’re running out of space on their phone so they delete things? Well then pictures weren’t available and you know it was creating problems for being able to show what was actually shipped because sometimes you know these pictures aren’t needed for months after a shipment has gone out. Got it, got it so basically you know I mean we know there are some warehouses that are literally a revolving door, right? I mean I’ve seen all kinds of you know scenarios and people leave and you know they take their phones with them and the photos are gone basically, right? Correct and so you guys still also, you know, searching on a phone for photos.

You know going back to the day that it’s supposedly shipped and looking through all the pictures like Load Proof gives you the ability to store the pictures together by the order number. Okay, and recall them that way. So it’s better for finding things as well. Correct? Very quickly you can retrieve the photos. So you’re, so today, you know, you don’t have that problem of people, you know, leaving with their phones and now you can pull the photos quickly.

And how do you guys show the photos to your customers? Do you email the photos or do you download the PDF and share it with them or what’s been the most effective way? We are currently downloading the PDF and sharing it. That is a little time-consuming just because you know you’ve got large photos and the time that it takes the system to develop that PDF. So, a streamlined way to share that, yeah, you know, without the added expense of giving a customer their own site so they could have access but being able to have individual customers have access to just loads associated with their account would be a very nice thing.

But as a 3PL with a lack of, you know, that margin on the product, we can’t exactly afford to set up each customer with their own Load Proof account. So right now we don’t give our customers access to Load Proof. We send them pictures as they request them. Got it. So it would be nice to do it even, I mean, you know, forget the cost, right? We’ll deal with the cost separately. So that’s something that you folks would like. You know, if we can, I would love for my customer to be able to look up the pictures and not bother me because half the time we haven’t done anything wrong, you know?

And so then it saves me the step of going and looking at pictures for orders when it all went out correctly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How many customers do you guys have approximately? Right? I mean, I’m you are in a silver plan. No, silver plan still has a, you know, like what, 10 users? You guys have 10 users, right? So we have about 30 customers but we only take pictures of LTL orders. Oh yeah, we don’t do anything for parcel shipments. So we’ve really only got, we only have three customers that we really use Load Proof for.

Okay, and then of those three, there’s one that asks for enough photos that, got it, you know, I would want to give them access. Okay, so so you guys haven’t given the matches because they would have visibility to everything. You want some kind of a filter criteria so they can see only specific loads? Is that why you have been given you’re still running the PDF? Maybe. Yeah, I never thought about just giving them access to all of Load Proof.

Okay, because we are working on a capability where, you know, we can provide some kind of a filter so you can set up that filter and give it to a, you know, external. We already have, you know, when we set up the manual, the when you do the initial setup and figure out how your screen is going to look, we put in a radio button for the customer so our loads are associated with a customer. Okay, and so if there was a way, you know, to give them restricted access to just those loads that have their radio button, that’ll be beneficial.

Yeah, but now that you put it like that, you know, there’s really nothing on Load Proof for other customers that I would have a problem with them seeing. So I might as well just give them access to all of it and yeah stop sending them pictures. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean that’s where, you know, we can help you guys, right? You know, there might be easier ways to, you know, do it rather than downloading the PDF every single time, right? Maybe especially right if it’s going to take time.

Okay, great. So do you have any ideas for improvement? Anything else that we can do that will make your life even better, you know, that will help you guys, you know, with Load Proof? So we have run into issues where, um, like I had an employee who dropped their phone in the water. Okay, and so she was logged in to Load Proof. Well now she had to get a new phone. She can’t log in on her new phone because it says she’s still logged in on her old phone.

And so like her username is no good anymore because she can’t log in. Okay, and so a way to, you know, force a log out or reset someone so that, you know, they can log in again. I know I talked to customer support or someone and they explain the reason why, you know, you have to have a unique log on and like I can’t be logged in as myself on my phone and have somebody else logged in as me on another device. But being able to force a log out so that, you know, we can set them up.

Um, or we had another issue where, and they shouldn’t have been doing this, but they were sharing the same login. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so someone logged in on their phone and then the same user logged in on a different device. Well, they couldn’t log out of the first device because it wouldn’t log in because they were, you know, like it basically trapped one device. Supposed to do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s all respectful. They were doing it wrong but now we’ve got a device that Load Proof won’t work on at all because it says that it’s logged in but it won’t let you log in and it won’t let you log out and so you’re just kind of stuck.

You can kill the app. I mean you can kill the app and restart it, you’ll be fine. And well it wouldn’t, it wouldn’t let her log back in. You can always go to the, you know, Load Proof user and delete that user and recreate a new user. Yeah, yeah. So there are other ways to, you know, overcome it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, I mean you know those things can be solved easily. So I mean, you know, have you guys thought about any other areas that Load Proof might be beneficial for you guys? You know, is it at this point are you using only for outbound?

You know, we’re currently using it for outbound. Okay, um, we have talked about using it in other areas and have implemented that some, you know, with like quality issues and things like that. Um, you haven’t gotten the most consistent basis that we use that is for outbound and that’s primarily to so these are customers. It’s like an OEM brand or is it like some kind of a manufacturing, you know, customer? Is that what it is? And you guys are providing logistics and distribution services for them?

Is that what it is? We’re sending the final goods into retail settings and so, you know, it’s going from our distribution center to a retailer distribution center. Okay, where their receiving practices are not always perfect and so you get into this he said she said where we said we shipped it all but they say they received it short and then we’ve got to be able to prove well we shipped it all and I don’t know how it got where it got to but okay it was perfect when it left our facility.

Right, it left here perfect. Okay, perfect. So, you know, I want to ask the retailer side of things how has it been, you know, how, you know, helpful Load Proof has been, you know, having these conversations with the retailer? Right, that I don’t know because there’s a layer between me and them, you know, I’m sending this back to my customer and saying no it left your right. So I could ask the question of, you know, are you able to use these Load Proof photos to force them, you know, to pay for these shortages and things because what happens is there’s a lot of lag time.

Like we send a shipment and then my customer may not realize that it was short until their customer short pays an invoice 60 days later. And so then they have this short paid invoice and they’re like, you know, they short paid it. They say it was short two cases. So then we look at pictures, we send them the pictures, we say it left here with all the cases. Yep, then you know it becomes this whole well did it get there, did the carrier lose it, you know?

Yeah, once I’ve proven that it left here correctly then you’re good. Okay, okay, good, good, your part of the job ends there. Okay, got it, got it. So, I mean, who is the, you know, carrier? Is it the carrier’s paid but the retailer or, you know, your customer is paying? My customer pays the carrier. Okay, and so, you know, how they deal with those freight claims whether they get paid for them by the carrier or they get paid for them by, you know, that they’re able to prove you actually did receive this and I need you to pay me for it.

Um, that’s kind of out of my purview. Okay, but I, um, you know, from a 3PL perspective the most important thing for us is just being able to prove that we did it right. Correct, correct, correct. And who are some of the retailers that you know this customer, your customer is dealing with? Do you know? So they’re in convenience stores, so it’s like McLean distribution, Core-Mark, E.B. Brown, these big like national distribution centers that supply convenience stores. Very interesting, very interesting.

And so they’re big, you know, automated warehouses and a lot of times they receive things wrong. Yeah, but convincing them that they’ve received something wrong is not an easy task. Yeah, okay, got it. And so like for instance we had just today, um, the carrier reached out to me and said, you know, this customer has refused 21 cases on, they’ve said they had an overage of 21 on this shipment and they were short 21 on this shipment that were both loaded onto the same truck, you know, could you shipped it wrong?

And I went back and looked and it actually left our facility on two separate days and just ended up in the LTL network arriving to the customer on the same day. And so we know we shipped it right because by the time the second order came into the system our first order was already gone so we couldn’t have missed next stop. Okay, they either mixed it up at receiving or they mixed it up in transit. Yeah, but with our pictures from Load Proof we were able to show that it left here right, you know, and also different dates, right?

Hey, this left on this date and this left a few days after the, you know, first shipment. Okay, so that’s awesome. Okay, that’s great. And what are some of your products like, you know, I mean is it like, you know, the convenience store, you know, what are some of your products like? So this particular customer, these are e-cigarettes so they’re pretty high value. Yeah, yeah. Okay, which is why it’s important but as a 3PL, I mean we have all different kinds of products.

Great, right. So so it sounds like it’s all high value products. I mean it’s not like, you know, I mean you know we deal with all types of customers. We have a lot of food customers that are shipping, you know, FTL, you know that’s still low value but still a lot of volume and it, you know, adds up. You know if you’re putting 45 pallets in a, you know, trailer that’s that’s still a lot. Right, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, and would you, would you recommend, you know, someone, you know, Load Proof if, if you know they’re having similar issues like you guys, you know? Yes, it’s a great, um, repository of information, you know. It’s much better than trying to take the pictures and file them in some way on your own server or send them via email. You know, it’s a great place to…