The Best Practice You Must Consider while Sealing FTL Containers to avoid retail chargebacks, freight claims, damage claims and rejected loads

container-seal-best-practices

This best practice is about applying the seal especially when it is a FTL’s shipment. FTL a full truck load container shipment trailer that’s going from point A to point B. 

It’s important to apply the seal and the seal number, and take the picture of that seal number and upload it to LoadProof so in case if you are a recipient or if you are a shipper you can see the photograph. If you’re a recipient you can ask the person on the origin side and say “hey give me this photograph”, or if you’re shipping you can take the picture of the seal number and say “hey look at it we did everything, we locked this thing perfectly and we applied a seal and here is the know picture of the seal and there is a seal number on it. 

This is very common in international shipments, in the international containers because it’s one big container going from point A to point B. You can do that and also this is something interesting that I’ve observed, if the shipment is coming from international locations such as Thailand, China, Indonesia, even India wherever it’s coming from it’s all stacked in the form of boxes. They don’t ship as pallets because they have a lot of Labor and they can do the stacking of these boxes and fully load the container in a cost-effective manner because labor is cheap there. 

But whereas when we receive here in the US we always stack them in pallets because everything is done through the forklift and it’s a lot of tools that we use because labor is very expensive here compared to countries in the Far East. So I often see the seal and when you open the seal and it’s this big container or a trailer with all these boxes completely floor loaded to the roof of the trailer in order to maximize the cube so that goes along together I guess. So the seal is a very important thing when they’re doing FTL, when you’re shipping to your customers or when your manufacturer is shipping to you or you are shipping to your customers in a FTL model. Hopefully you take the picture of the seal to show that you guys did a great job and everything is great and everything was loaded perfectly and you sealed the door and there is a seal number that was assigned to it. Hopefully this is helpful, please let us know if you have any questions.

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Puga Sankara is the co-founder of Smart Gladiator LLC. Smart Gladiator designs, builds, and delivers market-leading mobile technology for retailers, distributors, and 3PL service providers. So far, Smart Gladiator Wearables have been used to ship, receive, and scan more than 50 million boxes. Users love them for the lightweight, easy-to-use soft overlay keyboard and video chatting ability, data collection ability etc. Puga is a supply chain technology professional with more than 17 years of experience in deploying capabilities in the logistics and supply chain domain. His prior roles involved managing complicated mission-critical programs driving revenue numbers, rolling out a multitude of capabilities involving more than a dozen systems, and managing a team of 30 to 50 personnel across multiple disciplines and departments in large corporations such as Hewlett Packard. He has deployed WMS for more than 30 distribution centers in his role as a senior manager with Manhattan Associates. He has also performed process analysis walk-throughs for more than 50 distribution centers for WMS process design and performance analysis review, optimizing processes for better productivity and visibility through the supply chain. Size of these DCs varied from 150,000 to 1.2 million SQFT. Puga Sankara has an MBA from Georgia Tech. He can be reached at [email protected] or visit the company at www.smartgladiator.com. Also follow him at www.pugasankara.com.

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