Do You Take Pictures in Your Warehouse?
Here is another tip from our supply chain expert on chargebacks. We have this conversation with warehouse shippers and we run into some really interesting dynamics. Obviously organizations are paying and they are siloed. Sometimes operations managers don’t know what the CEO and CFO is concerned about.
If everything was great in an ideal organization then everyone would know everything. They are all singing the same song, but when we run into some ground realities it is not the same. They take pictures, but when we ask about the pain of taking photos in their organization when they ship their product from their organization when it’s leaving from the outbound dock and inbound dock the true realities we come to know. When you’re receiving a product from someone else do you take pictures they’re like “oh yes absolutely or we take pictures all the time”. The next question we ask them is where they store them, what happens to those pictures, and how they retrieve them. It will be in Mike’s smartphone, he’s the supervisor right now or it is in Jose’s inbox right that is the type of response we get.
When they get a claim or when they get a chargeback, they need to show the pictures. When they need these pictures they don’t know where the pictures are! It can be in Mike’s cell phone or it’s in Jose’s inbox. They’re spending a lot of time searching for those pictures and after spending all that time they find these pictures. After they find all they see is IMG001, DSC001, DSC002. They are spending all the time taking pictures and storing somewhere. They spend all the time to store and retrieve these pictures but at the end of the day it’s not usable. This is not a good system. To have such a system on process to take pictures, you don’t know where the picture is. So that’s why LoadProof was such a useful tool because your pictures are always there in this cloud repository.
You can retrieve them quickly and easily by searching for the right metadata. So that’s the one thing we consistently see. We take pictures at that point to cover their side of the story. They take pictures in their smartphones and sometimes that person leaves and we all know how the the operators churn in their distribution center. Especially on the operator side sometimes it’s 50%, 60%, 70% because it’s all temperate. Temp. workers come and go and at the peak time. That’s why it’s important to have a centralized repository of these pictures, that’s very quickly and easily retrievable when these operators need those pictures like three or four months down the line. When someone asks for those pictures during a claims situation and when these guys took the pictures when they ship the product, you can give those pictures they want to use. Those pictures can articulate that they did our job right. That’s why LoadProof is such a powerful tool because it has the central repository at one place, through which you can retrieve those pictures quickly.
If you guys have customers that have an operator that can monitor these processes right, you can add them up as users in that system. The moment you take pictures and upload them those pictures are available for these customers to look at. This is something to keep in mind and when we share this app and after showing the functionality people realize “oh my god I need this”. At the end of the day when we did not add value to you guys and if we did not articulate well, the value that is not only right for your organization, but also among all the customers that we have signed up. We’ve been adding value to everyone why that’s why we are able to run this up pretty fast and bigger. We have 90 plus sites added a short period of time and we have a lot more coming.
That’s why it’s important to understand these dynamics and as a CEO and CFO of the company you want to save money for your organization and this is all free money. This is all money, all you have to do is take pictures and show people that you did your job right, so you can have a healthy conversation. You can say: “guys it’s not fair for us to pay for these chargebacks because it’s not our fault”. Look how well we shipped our product and you can have that conversation and you can save all this money and you can turn on LoadProof fast for your organization and stop the bleeding right now. That’s why it’s important to think through these things like so that’s the point of this video. Thank you for taking the time to watch this video, please let us know if you have any questions or comments.
Puga Sankara
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. SG LoadProof is a patent pending Centralized Enterprise Photo/Video Document System on Cloud for Supply Chain. SG LP is built on the fact that photos & videos are vital docs as important as POs/SOs/Legal Contracts/Fulfillment Orders that reside in ERP/WMS/TMS systems, that serve as compelling, conclusive, unequivocal proof of crucial, critical, vital operations executed in Supply Chain within/across orgs when fulfilling customer orders as well as meeting contractual obligations between orgs as merchandise is transferred between different parties that partake in Supply Chain functions & operations. And these photos/videos data should not be stored in someone’s Smartphone or Email Inbox or in their personal/work Computer, but should be stored in a Centralized Enterprise system, where such data can be pushed into super-fast, stored securely, accessible to all stake holders (CFO/Sales Reps/Customer Support/AR/AP) in an org, as well as facilitates super-fast retrieval/sharing. LP is an Enterprise System of record for Photo/Video docs & is as important as an ERP which is an enterprise system of record for POs, SOs, Legal Contracts between parties etc. that have huge legal ramifications, also as important as a WMS (Warehouse Management System) that hold indispensable shipment & fulfillment data on orders. Like how Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat etc. have evolved into social media platforms/systems that enable individuals to showcase their beauty/pretty clothes/lovely cosmetics/hep coolness etc., LoadProof is an Enterprise system that holds similar photos/videos, but for a different reason, not for show off, but to serve as compelling, conclusive, unequivocal & indisputable system of record and proof that can be presented even in the court of law, when there is a dispute between parties while they execute many facets of the Supply Chain functions & operations. Puga is a supply chain technology professional with more than 25 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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