LoadProof Video Testimonial – Greg Wiltse, GlobalLoadProof Video Testimonial – Greg Wiltse, Global

All right, we’ll get started. Uh, you know, Greg, thank you very much for taking the time to help with this interview. This is very useful for us, you know, because you don’t switch this all the time.

So, you know, how did it get started, right? What was the problem that you guys were trying to solve? What was the frustration? How did you guys get to the point where you wanted to make it better?

So, we actually like to take pictures of our outbound shipments so that customers know how they left our facility. If they show up and they look kind of sketchy, we can show them a picture and say, “Look, when it left the building, it looked like this.” If it shows up looking like a pancake, then we need to talk to the carrier, not us.

Now, we had actually been doing these pictures for about 10 or 12 years. The way we were doing it was through an application on a workstation that used an imaging scanner. It was an old symbol scanner where you would scan a barcode, switch the mode of the scanner to camera, take a picture, and print out a very dark, very difficult-to-see black and white label.

That worked for a while, but technology has changed a little bit. Instead of a 2-pixel camera, you now have these 16-gigabit pixel cameras in your phone. People started asking if there was a way we could upgrade to take better pictures and make it mobile.

So, we poked around with the idea of actually writing our own solution, as we had done the first time. The gentleman who was doing that was having difficulty, so I got online and stumbled across you guys. I thought, “Hey, these guys have already solved our problem. There’s no need for us to worry about it anymore; let’s just call them.”

So, we had a process for taking pictures of outbound shipments. We just needed to make it way better, and your product did that for us. We gave up all development, bought tablets, and signed up with you guys.

That’s great! I mean, you know the feeling when you’re looking for something and then it comes to you? It’s a giant relief when you can say, “I do not need to reinvent the wheel.”

You obviously ran into LoadProof. What did you guys do next?

We sent an email to inquire about how it worked. I don’t remember the gentleman’s name, but he called us back almost immediately. We set up a demonstration, went through everything, and said that it solves probably 95-98% of our problems. We decided to go ahead and do it.

The only issue was that it worked on Android phones but didn’t work on Android tablets. You guys had to spin up a new app for the app store for us to download the tablet version, and once we did, we were off and running.

From that day on, you’ve been using it ever since?

Yes, we’ve been using it continually. It’s proven so useful that they now use it in the returns department to take pictures of items that come back to us. When the customer asks, “Why did I only get 90% of the value?” we can show them a picture and say, “This is what you sent us. You see that you’re missing the original packaging, the box of screws, and 12 of the 14 parts?”

Perfect! So, just to step back, what exactly is the business that you guys are supporting?

Right, so Global Equipment is a company that’s been around for about 70 years, selling warehousing supplies. We sell everything from swamp coolers and giant fans to pallet jacks, gloves to keep your hands clean, and heaters for the winter. If it gets used in a warehousing environment, then Global Equipment sells it.

Got it, got it. You’re supporting from an idea perspective, providing all the tools that the virus managers, the operators—everybody. I am in charge of all of the IPT software that global uses to ship from their five U.S. and two Canadian DCs. So the orders come to me from wherever the salespeople got them, and then I’m in charge of all the software that makes sure they get picked back, shipped, and sent to the customers as quickly and nicely as possible.

Got it, got it. Okay, so I mean, this is a different knob. Normally, I talk to the Bauhaus managers; those are the people that approach it. You know, this is an interesting scenario for us because, obviously, you guys know from an IT perspective, you have to support your end users. So, what are the areas where you guys found the most value? Typically, what we see is there is an outbound scenario, inbound scenario, and then all these people. Once something goes wrong—there’s a claim that was submitted, a chargeback issued to us—we spend a lot of time figuring out within the operations team, “Hey, how did this happen? Why did this happen? Where did we drop the ball?” So, what are some areas where you found the most value while solving the challenges pretty well?

Well, the single biggest area for us is our outbound shipments. Probably we ship about sixty percent of our product via UPS; the other forty percent are all LTL shipments that are either floor-loaded or strapped to pallets. So it’s very important to us to get pictures of those things as they’re loaded on the truck. When the pallet shows up, and let’s say it was a stack of pallet jacks, the truck pulls into the receiving customer, and they find pallet jacks all over the back of the truck like Legos. They’ll call us and tell us that we’re horrible because we don’t package things correctly, at which point we can actually say, “No, here’s all the pictures from where we loaded it. It was the carrier you chose that made the mess.”

Great example! That makes sense. So that’s outbound. You also mentioned inbound. Yep, we started inbound probably six months ago. I guess they were having a lot of questions about returns coming in for customers, where a customer would ship back—primarily, what we get back are kits that are missing some of the parts. The customer will send back 14 of 15 parts, but the 15th part is the important one. We can lay it all out, take a picture, and say, “Hey, look, this is what we received from you. You can either send us the 15th part or we’ll have to bill you for the missing part and give you credit for what we received.”

So is that in the partial scenario or which? Both partial and LTL scenarios. It covers both. So that means your picture-taking volume increased because, initially, from the outbound perspective, you were doing only LTL pictures. Correct. Then we increased it by starting to take pictures of our inbound freight also. Customers look at stuff. I know in the e-commerce world, the returns percentage is pretty high. We call e-commerce the necessary evil; returns are a natural evil when dealing with e-commerce. It does not produce any income; therefore, nobody wants to pay any attention to it.

Just curious, from your returns perspective, what portions of returns do you guys get? You know, I honestly don’t know. Much of my job is focused, as you just said, on the outbound because that’s where the money’s made, and returns are a necessary evil, so nobody’s asked me to go back and look. I’m sure someone in customer service or management knows exactly what the percentage is for our returns, but that’s not something I’ve ever been curious about.

So talk about the transformation. How was it before using Load Proof, and then you guys started using Load Proof? How did your life change? What got better? Before Load Proof, as I said, the picture process was from a 12-year-old piece of technology printing out on a 2×4 label from a Dymo printer. There were three fixed stations in every DC where you could go to take a picture. You have to picture someone preparing enough stuff for a full truckload—26 pallets. They would drag 26 pallets one at a time over to the workstation, take a picture, drag that pallet back, and repeat this whole process 26 times.

With you guys, we have it all on a tablet. Once it’s all ready to go, they just walk along and take pictures of them as they’re going on the truck. There’s no walking, no moving; you can take pictures right where it’s at. The other benefit is since we’re supplying the tablets, we don’t have to set up more printers, more hand scanners, and things of that sort. We are only limited by the number of scanners we have. Every DC started with five and has added an additional five, so we went from an initial five to ten without additional costs in software.

So it was very easy to expand, and it streamlined the whole process, saving hours per week in picture-taking. Would you recommend Load Proof? If I am given the opportunity, and somebody says, “Do you have a solution for this problem?” I most wholeheartedly would recommend you guys. I have no problems or qualms about it. You guys solved a lot of stuff and saved us a lot of time.

Just a ballpark—how much dollar savings did Load Proof result in after you switched? I honestly don’t know because I don’t know the cost. There’s a term for it—labor cost, I think. I don’t know that cost, and we didn’t do a time study beforehand, but it’s easy to say we’re saving probably 70 to 80 hours per week in every DC. That’s basically the equivalent of two employees, so whatever two employees cost our company, we save every week just by streamlining the process.

Two employees for a warehouse—fully loaded, at least $25 per hour. That’s like $50,000 per year. It’s a very significant savings for us for a minimal investment. This is great; I will stop recording this video and then we’ll start the second recording.