Your Business

  • You are a warehouse manager that ships high value consumer products. The following are some examples
    • Flat screen televisions
    • Washer
    • Dryer
    • Refrigerator
    • Fancy Furniture
  • Your delivery guys might even make delivery of these products at the buyer’s homes
  • The manufacturer might also give you specific delivery and assembly instructions, it is very important to follow those steps because if any mistake is made, the customer will not be able to get benefits from the warranty offered by the manufacturer – so you have to be extremely careful here
  • You might also ship these products direct to customers
  • As these are very expensive SKUs and sometimes fragile, so a lot of care needs to be taken while transporting these products
  • As a warehouse manager, you are responsible for the following
    • The warehouse manager leads and coordinates all aspects of the distribution process within the Supply Chain network.
      Leads site’s planning, execution, and communication of all daily clerical and operational processes, including:

      • Labor Planning & Driver Management
      • OSHA, FDA and DOT Compliance
      • General Administrative Duties
        Employee hiring
        Payroll
      • Customer Service Responsibilities
      • Human Resource Administration
      • Product Functionality Checks and Cleaning
      • Warehouse Functions/ Servant Leadership
      • Load Planning, Routing, and Carrier Management
      • Collection/Reporting of KPI data
        Sometimes you are responsible for the P&L of the site as well
  • Specialize in many things some of them are
    • FDA DEA Regulated
    • Just keep in mind – if you are handling products that require FDA approval – you have to maintain all the documentation for up to 12 years, it could be anywhere upto 3 or 7 or 12 years. We have a customer, these guys ship health related products, every return they get, they need to maintain that returns documentation for 12 years, they have this large warehouse that has only papers – all the returns documentation from the returns they received.
    • Offering VAS – Value Added Services
      • Price Ticketing
      • Assembly
      • Special packing
      • Gift Orders – These orders are special, because the most important thing in a gift order is to wow the recipient, so it requires special skills to execute gift orders flawlessly,
    • Ecommerce fulfillment
    • Cross Border Transportation – Mexico & Canada
  • Often you have to absorb costs even though it is not your fault

Your Supply Chain Community

Your Supply Chain community comprises of people that you do business with, usually it is made of all these people

  • Manufacturers that manufacture products
  • Carriers
    • Trucking companies
    • Ocean Carriers
    • Rail Carriers
    • Air Carriers
    • Multi modal – Ocean, Land, Rail, Air
  • Third Party Logistics Service Providers
  • Vendors that you buy your products from
  • Cross Dock Facility operators
  • Consolidation Facility operators
  • LTL Terminals
  • Parcel Carriers
  • Delivery Companies
  • Freight Forwarders
  • Freight Brokers

It is very important to keep in mind that you will work with all these people on a regular basis, so build and maintain professional relationships. While shipping products, moving products mistakes do happen, sometimes it is theirs, sometimes it is yours, whatever it is work with your partners, keep proof in LoadProof to demonstrate that you did your job right. So, you can have a professional conversation and articulate your position in a professional way, it is okay to say in a very professional and gentle manner, “Hey it is not fair for us to pay for mistakes that is not ours, here is a proof in the form of pictures”. However, do not burn bridges everybody is working very hard to make it for themselves. Also, people move on and change roles very quickly in this industry, so the same person could take up a different role and you might face them in a completely different side. So always build and maintain professional relationships, do not burn bridges. So, when you are working with such a community of Supply Chain service providers, having LoadProof and pictures to prove that you did your job right, gives you a solid ground to stand on, when something happens to your shipment.

Your Challenge

  1.  You are losing dollars due to Freight claims
  2. You are losing money on damages – your customers are submitting damage claims to you
  3. You are losing money on rejected loads
  4. You want to keep that money in your pockets or your customer’s pockets
  5. So, you started taking photos in your official Digital camera
  6. Some of your people started taking photos in their personal cell phones but the process had the following drawbacks
    1. Take photos in a device, either a digital camera or a smart phone
    2. Then you have to save the photos somewhere in a Google drive or Shared drive or Shared Folder
    3. Then manually have to search the photos to find the right ones when there are any questions
    4. Cumbersome to copy the photos from the camera
    5. Time consuming to organize photos for future reference
    6. No back up for the photos – What if your computer suddenly crashed?
    7.  No visibility across the Supply Chain – Other operators in the Supply Chain cannot see the pictures – your vendors, customers, carriers, lumpers, personnel at the cross-dock facility, insurance companies cannot see them

What is a Freight Claim?

You shipped your product through a carrier to your customer. The carrier failed to deliver the product in a perfect manner, it was not delivered in the same condition as it left your facility. And often the carriers insure these transportation moves. So, if there is a problem or if there is an act of god, for example thunderstorm or a tornado or any natural disaster that damaged your shipment you can file a claim to the Carrier and then get compensated. We are actually a partner with Mercury Gate My Ez Claims, so if you have pictures in LoadProof and you are already using My Ez Claim, you can automatically pull the pictures from LoadProof into My Ez Claim and submit those pictures to the Carrier along with your Freight Claim. That makes getting compensated by the carrier easier. Because these shipments are insured, often the insurance companies get involved and you know what happens when an insurance company is involved, you got to submit all kinds of proof to prove that the shipment left your facility in perfect condition, that is where LoadProof comes in, using LoadProof you can exactly do that. You can take 1000s of pictures and within no time you can find those pictures and share them with whoever you need to share them with.

What is a Damage Claim?

A damage claim is submitted by a customer to you, when the product you shipped did not arrive in a good condition where the customer is doing extra work to get the product to work. This could potentially result in an automatic deduction in the invoice you submitted to your customer, meaning if you submitted an invoice for $10,000 the customer is going to pay only $9000 and quote the damage claim as the reason for the automatic deduction. That is where you can show pictures from LoadProof to demonstrate that you did your job correctly and it is not your fault. If it is a Carrier’s mistake you can submit a Freight Claim to the carrier if you paid for the carrier, or if your customer paid for the carrier, then you can tell that to your customer and get paid fully on the invoice.

Different 3PL scenarios to take pictures of

  1. Outbound Loading and Shipping
  2. Inbound Receiving
  3. Inbound Damages
  4. Outbound Trailer Seals
  5. Trailer Conditions
  6. Trailer Cleanliness – especially when shipping food products
  7. Documents
    1. FDA (Food and Drug Administration), sometimes even Drivers licenses of Drivers that are picking up your loads and making deliveries of your loads
    2. Bills of Lading
    3. Proof of Delivery
    4. Parcel Manifest
  8. GEMBA walks – Gemba (also written as genba) is a Japanese word meaning “the actual place.” In lean practices, the gemba refers to “the place where value is created,” such as the shop floor in manufacturing, the operating room in a hospital, the job site on a construction project, the kitchen of a restaurant, and the workstation of a software programmer. A popular approach in companies who implement lean principles is called “Gemba walks,” which denote the action of going to see the actual process, understand the work, ask questions, and learning from those who do the work (showing respect to them). It is an opportunity for management and support staff to break away from their day-to-day tasks to walk the floor of their workplace to identify wasteful activities.The objective is to understand the value stream and its problems, rather than review results or make superficial comments from their office or conference room.
  9. Trailer Numbers
  10. Proof of compliant loads
    1. Packing
    2. Labelling
    3. Stacking
    4. Stretch Wrapping
      1. Using the wrapper with the right gauge – The gauge is even more important because if it is an LTL shipment the gauge you apply have to be higher because you are going to move the product too many times
      2. If it is an FTL shipment, then the gauge can be slightly less

Benefits

  1. Cost Savings
  2. Labor Reduction – no need to manage all these photos
  3. Show that the product was shipped Outbound Damage Free – No damages
  4. Capture damages in the Inbound Product
  5. Prove that the correct quantity was shipped – No overages, No shortages
  6. Paper Trail – Supply Chain Visibility & transparency across multiple parties
  7. Significantly improved Customer Satisfaction
  8. Significantly improved Relationships with customers
  9. You are not eating the cost yourself in order to not lose customer (even though it was not your mistake)
  10. 95% customer compliant reduction
  11. Compliance
    1. Overage, Shortage & Damage issues avoided
    2. Proof for Damage Claim
    3. Proof for Shortage or no shortage
  12. 75% cost reduction in labor spent on researching problems after they happened

Additional Customer Results

  1. Customer Satisfaction through self-service portal – customers love this – no training needed
  2. Documentation – cost savings $20K
  3. Trailer Damage fine reduction – $5K
  4. Compliance for International Shipment – Cargo containers that go international, very often they would bounce around and move so many times in the ships and would get damaged very frequently by the time they reach the international destination after travelling through the ocean
  5. 20% Savings in Freight Claims