LoadProof Video Testimonial – Ryan Bicksler, Berner

All right, um Brian thank you for taking the time to uh join this interview and uh you know thank you for offering to uh you know share your experience uh with uh um using Loadproof. So let’s start from the beginning, right? So you know where were you guys before you found out about this uh you know tool called Loadproof and you know what was the you know problem you were trying to solve and what were some of the frustrations?

Before we found out about Loadproof, my company is a 3PL company for burner food and beverage. We were seeing particularly from our transport division a lot of loads that were going out that would be secure from our end, you know, would be good in all aspects and safe for transit. Then when they would arrive at destinations, you know, they’d be tipped; it would be all over—it would just be a mess.

So, before Loadproof, we were just kind of taking some pictures with like our phone. We didn’t really have anything to correlate and really kind of capture what we were recording. We actually heard about Loadproof from another company that works for the same customer. They also use Loadproof, so we heard about how well it was working for them. I looked into it, you know, I decided hey let’s give it a shot and it’s worked out great. I mean we’ve been able to capture our data from our end; it’s been simple to use.

We’ve been able to, you know, record the trailer numbers, the, you know, what side it was coming off of from our docks, and perhaps the biggest thing for us is it’s all just conveniently stored into like one area. We don’t have multiple people trying to share pictures and trying to correlate getting it all together. It’s worked out great, so much so that we continue to roll it out across our different facilities as well now too.

Great, great, great—that’s fantastic! Um, so you know how did you first hear about us? I mean, you know, it was like hey you know I have this problem and I don’t know how to solve this. How did you guys solve it from yourself? Is that like a conversation that started somewhere?

Yeah, so I was talking with the general manager for the other company. I’m general manager for our company for this area, and I was just kind of saying hey, you know, we’re seeing all this transportation stuff. The GM for the other company was like, yeah we utilize Loadproof, you know, that way we can just capture everything—it’s right there. If our customers want to see it, it’s right there; the transportation department wants to see it—it’s like you could look into that.

I was like okay, you know, let me do a little bit of background. I hadn’t heard about it prior to that. I went onto your guys’ website, started looking through, and I was like oh, okay, you know what? I’ll give it a shot. We’ll see if this works for my company. It took us a little bit to go through the setup, but then once we got it rolled out, yeah, it’s been a great tool for my company.

Okay, great. Yep, that’s how we kind of heard about Loadproof. So what is the problem you guys have? I mean, as a food distributor, you know, what are some of your products? Is it like dry produce, frozen items?

A lot of it is jarred cheese, canned coffee beverages, and aerosol cheese. My main warehouse is out at the production facility for burner food and beverage. When we get the finished product, we send it over to their company so they can actually store it. When we were loading stuff into the trailers, like the jar cheese and aerosol cheeses, we would double stack everything. Jarred cheeses we would just single stack, but when we sent it off, everything would look good from our end.

We would airbag, you know, we would put load bars up, but then when it was arriving to them, they would reject the load back to us because by the time it got to them, some pallets in the front were getting tipped. It was a situation where it was like, okay, we need something because we know this is now becoming a transportation problem, but we need something that can kind of capture our data and say hey, you know what? Instead of you rejecting it back to us, we actually need to look at the root cause.

I actually need to go to the transportation department, but I need something to prove this. Again, I mean, we would take some pictures with the supervisors on the floor’s phones, but we didn’t really have anything that was all correlating into just one area where, you know, again, if they were to come to me and say okay, you know, on August 15th trailer 53728 went out, you know, this got rejected back—do you guys have any pictures of it? With Loadproof, it’s so simple because I can go back and be like okay, August 15th, yep, here’s the trailer number that we got set up; yep, here’s the pictures.

Got it. So is all this cheese getting shipped in a cold container or something like that?

It depends on the time of year. A lot of the cheese and stuff right now is being shipped on dry vans. Once we get closer to the colder climates, because it’s in jars, yeah, we’ll have to start shipping more on reefer trailers just because of the fact that depending on how quickly they offload it on the other end, it can’t sit for a very long time, particularly since we do hot fill. When you go hot to that cold, a lot of the jars will end up just breaking.

Right now, we do a lot of just dry shipments, but as we start getting to the colder climates, yeah, we’ll start utilizing some more reefers in terms of transportation. Got it. So, you know, what made you guys pull the trigger? Hey, you know, we gotta do this. I mean, you know, it’s not about the cost or, you know, I mean, it’s not expensive; it’s a very, very less expensive tool. What made you guys hold the trigger on it?

It was just the amount of damages that were coming back to us that were getting rejected. We knew some of this was being caused by transportation, but again, we didn’t really have any correlation. We needed something that said okay, we’re seeing, you know, I think one week we had seven trailers rejected back to us, so it’s like okay, we’re getting a lot of trailers rejected back.

To find out what the root cause is and be able to go back without having to dig through data. What brought it all on was the amount of rejections we were seeing. We needed to figure out where the actual root cause was coming from.

The experience so far has been really good. We’re rolling it out more across different shifts and facilities. Initially, we had to set it up properly, introducing it gradually. As we started seeing more pictures come across, we noticed less rejected trailers. When there has been an issue, we can point back to the pictures and say the load was in good shape.

Our team adapted fairly well. We assigned licenses to our supervisors and team leaders took pictures as well. It’s easy to use, so everyone handled it well.

The biggest improvement has been the decrease in rejected loads. We went from four to six rejections a week down to maybe one a week. This has improved how we send our product out and made our people more conscious of transporting safely.

Yes, I would definitely recommend Load Proof. It’s convenient and easy to use. If someone has similar issues, I’d recommend it without hesitation.

It’s easy to use and can save costs significantly. Less rejected trailers mean reduced transportation costs and less damaged product.

We’ve seen tremendous cost savings. We don’t have to deal with transportation costs or damage costs anymore.

We’re saving on labor hours too. Less time discussing rejected loads means our team can focus on their tasks.

If I had to estimate, it’s probably over ten thousand dollars per month in savings, leading to over a hundred thousand dollars annually.

This has been tremendous for us, making life much easier. We’re in the process of rolling it out to more shifts and facilities. I would definitely recommend it.