LoadProof Video Testimonial – Andrew Shiang, Reckitt Benckiser

i think we haven’t met before. um you’ve been working with uh karthik before and then now part. yeah okay great i mean thank you for being a customer with load proof and i hope we are delivering on all the commitments and the promises we made. right that’s always uh you know our experience with loadproof has been very positive so far. it definitely lines up with kind of what we’re looking for and a level of detail that we’re needing. you know i think some of the sites are still the workers that we have we do kind of have some turnover and so it’s a fairly easy system to kind of train people up on too. so that’s definitely a benefit. just a quick note i want to add a quick note um i don’t know if you guys are familiar with something called a guided photo capture. basically you can configure the sop because you mentioned that you know warehouses i’ve seen literally revolving doors sometimes right. in order to address that scenario we have something called guided photo capture.

right so where in the app you can configure the sop step one step two step three step four all the way to step ten step twenty and it will tell the user hey take photo of the front of the truck or back of the truck or side of the pallet. this that right step or staging a staged pallet something like that. you can set that up so it makes the onboarding even easier and faster. okay yeah and what we’re trying to do too so i wasn’t aware of that. we’re trying to officially sign off this project. some of the procedures and sops that we have like we have uh previously. we had an intern kind of working on this project adam who’s no longer with us as the internship ended but he had created a lot of job instructions and screen captures. so what we’re trying to do now is really formalize that and put it into our control docs system.

so we’re taking a lot of those um one point lessons and job aids and trying to proceduralize them officially. great great i think yeah that’s a you know i mean you guys initially it wasn’t like a you know primary project hey put an intern on it and now it’s kind of becoming much more mission critical right. it’s our new way of life yeah i understand that. i mean that’s exactly how we do that as well when we pursue small projects we’re not sure about how we put an intern or some entry-level papers and then it turns out hey you know then we take it. so that’s great progress. i want to understand right you know how is the experience with load proof right. usually right there are two aspects to it right from a technical rollout perspective getting all the things right.

getting the system set up and all that that’s one and then second is from you know user adoption right. i mean you know we’re all humans right we don’t want change you know x one oh this is one extra thing that i have to do now i’m already doing like 20 things and now you’re adding one more thing to my plate. hey does it make sense right how was the you know if you could please talk about the first one the technical system rollout and second one the user adoption the change management and some of the challenges that you guys have to work through and get the people to embrace this process right. to be honest there really wasn’t um anything that set us back too much. the way we kind of rolled it out and with adam’s help was certainly a big piece of that too.

with adam’s help kind of implementing in each site we had everything that we needed so it really just became a matter of doing a small little classroom type training with the folks and then you know walk them through the system and then do it on the floor. so the change management piece of it you know i’m used to hey this is something new why do we have to do it and a lot of pushback with that. there really wasn’t that much i think people saw the fact that previous to load proof everything was documented on paper. so it’s less paperwork that they have to fill out and we’re more technology savvy now. okay so it looks like you guys have figured out a way to digitize this whole paper process that you guys had looks like is that a fair statement? yeah yeah and there was a lot of redundancy in our paperwork and it just didn’t have that ability to you know when an issue came up.

and we said hey were you checking it you signed off in your documentation well there’s that extra level of accountability now with the pictures embedded and just the whole process overall. and so not only is retrieving data easier to get but our consistency in how we complete our checks and the thoroughness with which we complete our checks too is a lot better. so we really haven’t had any issues. the only piece of feedback and i’m sure there’s a way to do it because i was kind of reviewing the job instructions but there are some questions where we know there’s going to be pretty consistent responses to some of the questions. so we wanted to just add like drop-down boxes for you know pre-formatted answers that we could just select.

that was like the only feedback and i think there is a work instruction on how we can adjust those questions correct. set up radio buttons because you know this is one thing that we pay a lot of attention to right. you know our job you know we understand the warehouse so thoroughly and and the last thing we want to impact is your throughput your production numbers. we want to make it as simple as possible and and we gotta empathize with the user right. i mean he is you know either having a small device or a tablet that still has a small you know keyboard and he has to type it on that. and he’s constantly switching you know from an assembly mode to a data entry mode so you know his brain is like constantly switching from this to that this to that this to that. and that’s why you know we provide this radio button so you can set it up.

the pre-formatted answers in the form of radio button all he has to do is just choose one and then keep going right. yep yeah and again that’s literally been the only you know suggested piece of feedback and it just has it’s been something that we’ve kind of de-prioritized for the moment with some other initiatives going on but overall experience has been very good with it. the roll out you know we were very conscious of you know the change and some of the resistance that could come along with it. but the way we structured it is kind of rolling it out on day shift you got all the resources there kind of get the hands on and all the questions and once we kind of got that down then we rolled it out to the off chef and now it’s just part of our process. it’s so much easier than managing all the paperwork that comes with all of the printed documentation that we have.

and for us to review it and get in there and kind of check it you know i’m a little bit further from the front line so i only go in there like once a week at this point to just make sure that my team is following up on their end. but they’re on the floor like they’re witnessing the checks they’re they’re part of their kind of boots on the ground it is checking it and so we have a really good process i think. and you know this is just really kind of streamline the flow and taking some of that that noise of extra work and the focus like you mentioned and kind of allowed us to focus on the important things while we’re still keeping track of the things that’s important to the customer and our quality department correct. so essentially you guys are building those pdvs right the promotional display vehicles or whatever it’s called the pallets that are for distinct to all these details.

yeah we do so we do embellishment work displays um and even some kind of conversion of same things that the factory does. we just our additional capacity for that more value-added service something like that. yeah or just right now you know we’re still kind of on the tails of coved demand and everything so there’s a lot of demand out there for the cleaning products that we make. yep um and so we kind of replicate in kind of rudimentary ways what the what factories like full-fledged factories might do within the network or we provide a different um pack out or variety because you know we’re we’re manual we can kind of piece it all together where maybe they may not have the automation on their line to do that. got it got it that makes sense. yeah i mean i’ve done this for many other companies brands so i completely get it what you guys are doing.

okay that makes sense. so you know what you know what are do you guys you know thought about hey you know this would be nice to have in load proof. any improvements that we can do for you that will make your life even you know easier and you know anything that we can do add to the product from a capability perspective so you know it’ll be useful for you guys. so there have been some suggestions and so right now we essentially use load proof for basically our quality checks right. when i so previous to working in embellishment i i came from the factory from wreck it and actually i suggested our warehouse team at the factory use load proof. so ayu gunzafari who’s who i kind of connected um parts to at the plant you know for their warehouse operations this totally made sense for me.

at the factory we also had another software system that’s not available on the current side of the business that i’m on. but we had a lot of our safety forms built in to a software system so not only could we do our quality checks in there but we also had safety forms. so whether it was documenting uh an incident that happened so like somebody you know scratches their finger and they need a band-aid like getting all the details together and creating a form for that. where we could embed the pictures of here’s the situation here’s what happens here’s you know maybe a picture of the injury or whatnot. having all that available was really beneficial to us. in today’s world again we don’t have that electronic system so it’s all kind of either documented on paper or even sometimes via email and we have to kind of go retrieve.

if we were able to have something like that on the floor and i’m not even sure if you guys have anything like that. additional forms that are kind of within that safety realm that we we would like to document. so we have a couple instances where it’s an accident that happens that we want to document all the details and everything that goes along with it. a near-miss something that almost happened but didn’t we still want to do that same level of documentation a teachable moment right a learning learning experience. hey we saw this you know we got to learn from this and we want to document this. absolutely i mean it’s you guys are using custom categories right? yes they are using custom categories for two things right now uh with start of the shift yeah second one is qc.

okay now we can add one more safety custom category and you guys can use it you know even you know equally it works really well for safety. and we have many customers that are using it for safety. yeah absolutely yeah okay yeah i would definitely be interested in seeing you know maybe any example that you could share and kind of get the wheels turning here and see how we can take a spin on it. absolutely absolutely we’ll be happy to help. yeah i will get a few examples from proof system i will email you and yeah uh we like we did not had chance due to christmas and like holiday season like at that time we had like site setups so we did not have chance to move forward with other features. but yeah definitely we provide a safety feature where we can add a custom category and we can digitalize whole checkbox like whole form safety form into the proof.

correct and perfect yeah that sounds great. yeah and you guys can even make videos right.

Sometimes you know these videos are much more effective, and you can pull that on a training session and show it to the guys. You know this is not the way to do it, and we gotta, you know, this is the right way to do it, and things like that. Yeah, yeah, perfect. You do have that form, like with you, the safety form. If you can send it to me, I can create a custom category on one of your sites, and then I can show you the back if possible.

Yeah, sure thing! I can send you an example from the plant that we had. That’s great. I mean, thank you for sharing this feedback; this helps a lot. You guys already have the product; it’s a matter of just turning it on for one more functional area. Right? So what else, you know, any other feedback like this, Andrew?

The only other thing that I could potentially think of is sometimes, kind of within the quality system we have non-conforming material, whether it’s something that we did, we screwed something up, or maybe we have problematic material that we’ve received from a supplier. There are times where I feel like it would be good for us to have, again, treat it like an incident; there’s an event that happens. We want to document all the details or we want to document the performance issues it might have had with the material itself.

If we had a form available for that, again something replicating what we had at the plants where I could put all that information together—lot information, which lines it ran on, what timeframe it happened, kind of how we can manage this. If it’s something that we need to kind of segregate within our systems, just check boxes for, yes, we’ve held it in the system or yes, we’ve reached out to the vendor, and kind of used that to help keep our progress on either resolving the issue, reworking the product, or communication with the vendor and getting our chargeback or inventory replacement.

Absolutely! We can help with that. It sounds like it’s one more subset of quality findings where, hey, this is either touched by RB or before even touching the RB, something like that. We can absolutely help you guys with that. No questions at all. We can observe; there’ll be another category, and you can set up all the different sets of metadata for that and capture everything.

Yeah, and right, I mean obviously you guys have been there for quite some time from the beginning, and you know maybe you guys are not fully aware of all the new things that we have implemented. Custom categories have been really popular among all our customers, and they are taking advantage of it; it helps them nicely to deploy for different functional areas.

That’s exactly what you’re asking. Great, yeah, absolutely. We can help with that, no problem at all. Anything else? I mean, anything else that would help make the product better? This would help us, you know, do this type of thing. Anything else that you would like to add from a product capability feedback perspective?

At this point, probably I don’t think I have any other suggestions. I will regroup with the team when we have a meeting tomorrow, just kind of about quality and about some of the issues, and I’ll share some of the feedback about potential opportunities for what we have or what you guys have available. I’ll see if I can maybe get some additional feedback to send back to you guys.

That’ll be great! Yeah, if you could please email that to Bart. We are all ears, and we love the early adapters like yourself because that’s where we get the most feedback from, and we can help you guys get the most out of the product. Right? Anything that you guys share with us, sometimes from a functional perspective, it might be a big deal; from a technical implementation perspective, it might be a small thing that we can do that will make your life so much easier.

Yeah, please share all the feedback with us, and we’ll be happy to implement it. What would you recommend LoadProof for someone else that’s in your shoes running these quality processes? What are your thoughts?

Yeah, I mean coming from, you know, I’ve had several different ways where we’ve tracked quality before, and they’ve all kind of come with their own niche or capabilities. But for what we do, it’s a little bit more simple than the factory, and the amount of checks and things that we have to do is not as complicated. It’s not like we’re continuously weighing things; we don’t have all this ancillary equipment that needs to feed into our data systems. Everything is very manual for us.

This kind of fits exactly what we need; it’s the right level of attention to what we need and the ability to capture. I’m sure there are a lot more capabilities of it that are just way above and beyond what we would ever need. Again, I already recommended it back to the plants on the warehousing side because I saw the benefits of it. I knew what their opportunities were to improve and what could possibly help, and I fully recommended it to the factory because of that.

There are a lot of good things that you guys do, and it’s just simplistic. When it all comes down to it, it’s easy to navigate, it’s easy to work through. They have a little bit more capable and experienced operators at the plants, while I’m working with a lot of contract workers. All of my frontline associates are contract workers, so they don’t necessarily have all the skill sets needed that a factory worker might have.

Just out of curiosity, are your contract workers typical warehouse operators getting paid fifteen to twenty dollars per hour, or are they a little more skillful than that? You know, do they have something like a forklift license or reach truck license? Are they just basic powerhouse workers, or are they a little more skilled but not as skilled as the plant operators?

Everybody in my operations at the three sites is just your typical kind of warehouse worker. They don’t necessarily have machine operating technology understanding. They are just very manual; they might use manual power checks, not using any kind of forklifts or anything. At the factory, those guys are trained up on many different things, and the skill sets are exponentially greater.

They’re in the twenty to thirty dollar an hour range, a little bit more skilled worker. But for the application I referred to at the plant, those guys are warehouse workers, so they’re already using scanning systems for the movement of the goods. But the documented quality of how the loads were loaded and how the loads were received, they lack that capability at the plant.

It’s something that those guys could easily pick up based on our experiences with the system. Great, great, great! Awesome, awesome! Thank you for sharing that. Anything else? Just, hey, here’s an observation for you, here’s a comment from my site. Anything else that you would like to add about LoadProof?

Not that I can think of. Okay, great! I mean, thank you very much for sharing this feedback; it helps us a lot. Our mission is to make life better for people like you, for the people that work for you guys, your team, and the operations folks on the floor. By giving them a tool—not just for technology for technology’s sake—but really a tool that makes their life better, you know, makes their day-to-day operations easier.

So, that’s our mission. It helps a lot for me to hear from the end user, you know, folks like yourself. Hey, we are indeed executing on that mission, delivering on that mission, making life better. That’s the most important thing. When we do that really well, everything else falls in place—money comes in, happy customers, everything else.

Thank you for taking the time to share that feedback; it helps a lot. Yeah, definitely! I appreciate how open you guys are to the feedback and some of the oddball requests. You’re always available; anytime I have a question, you know, just reaching out to Bart, he’s really good at following up and getting it back to the group.

Overall, just my short time on this side of the business, the experience with the LoadProof team and everything that we’ve kind of implemented since I started has been very positive feedback—very, very positive from the team, not just myself. They’re the ones out there using it more of the time. I certainly will reach back out and circle back with them to see what other ideas or aspirations they might have for systems like this.

Absolutely! We are all here. Thank you very much for the time, and thank you for sharing this candid feedback; this helps a lot. Thank you, man, thank you for setting this up!

And Andrew, one more question: how many CMOs are there in the United States from RB? I believe right now we are working with three sites, but how many total sites are there?

You guys are getting so much value from three sites; you know, let’s go all over, man! That’s a good question. We only have the three sites. Internally, there is another side of the business, the health business, but they use a lot of external embellishers. Those would be outside of RB, and we just kind of manage the relationships.

But the three sites that we’re in—St. Peter’s, Atlanta, and Harrisburg—those are the only true RB CMO sites. Regarding the factories, there are probably five production factories, maybe more in the US. St. Peter’s is one; Iube is the materials manager for that side, but he’s just the warehousing materials logistics side of things. There’s still a whole other production side, and I know they already have systems set up.

I’m not sure what contracts and whatnot licenses they have for the current systems they use. Every site has something similar, at least in the warehousing aspect of it, the inbound and outbound. If you’re able to work with Iube and the team and they like it and want to continue to pursue it, I would suggest offering it to some of the other sites because they essentially do exactly what he’s doing, just in a different location.

Great, great! That’s been a pretty standard thing, something to think of. We do that all the time with three PLs because what happens is, for example, on a residue is one; Pelican is one. These are customers that have three PLs that are running some of their DCs, and they want to have their three PL take photos so Pelican or Residue can have visibility to everything.

That’s been, obviously, on the distribution side. You’re talking about something similar on the manufacturing side in outsourcing. I think we are working with George on the health side of the business.

Yeah, we’ll ask him if it makes sense or something. I believe you are also a site in Atlanta, so whenever you are in Atlanta, please let us know. I would be happy to meet. We are dragging our tech square at Georgia Tech, and we would be happy to meet for lunch or something.

There is a chance I could be in Atlanta at the end of this month. Are you there for Modex?

No, we have a couple of our engineers going to that. I’m actually going down because at the Atlanta CMO, we’re gonna do a little kickoff. We’ve got this big kind of shindig thing to revamp some of the things we do in operations and make a big deal about it. But yeah, we have a couple of guys going to Modex that week.

Yeah, let us know. Please, let’s put something on the calendar; let’s grab lunch at least, right? You guys are in the Brazilian area, right?

They’re in Jefferson. Okay, that’s where Kenko runs, in Brazilton. I know the facility; I know the place. Yeah, we got multiple customers there. Cokey Holdings is another customer there. I know this exit; I think it’s 120 exit on 1885 North. We drive from Atlanta.

Yeah, I know exactly where you guys are. I’ve spent a lot of time there. I think we should at least meet for lunch. If you could please find out the dates and lock them in, put something on the calendar, we should at least meet for lunch.

Sure! Once I firm up my trip, if we’re actually gonna be able to meet that timeline or not, I’ll certainly reach out and let you guys know I’m in the area.

Perfect, perfect! Awesome, awesome! Thank you very much for your time. Anything else Bart wants to ask?

No, that’s it. I will work on emails without Drew, like putting forms and setting up new categories.

Perfect! Thank you, Andrew. Thank you very much for the time.

All right, thank you!

Thank you!