The Best Practices in Avoiding Pallet Damages and Separation During Transit
Transcript
This is another interesting question that came from one of our customers and this was like “hey we have this problem where we are shipping these pallets and somehow these pallets are broken into two and and they get delivered as two different pallets”. Even though they tell the carrier or whoever they are shipping through that nobody’s supposed to be doing that.
What they found out was that the solution was to fully shrink wrap the pallet and then fully seal it with a security tape around the pallet and then add a sign saying “do not separate pallet”. There are stickers that you can use as a label or even print a sheet of paper and then add do not separate pallets in a different color or even in a red color so that they know they’re not supposed to separate this pallet.
Also it’s better to apply a security tape so if the security tape is tampered with, you can show “hey look at these pictures when it left our facility this is how it was shipped and it’s all supposed to be in one pallet but when it arrived this is how it arrived”. You can say “hey this is something we don’t want or somebody did that which is not our fault and we had clear instructions saying that do not separate this pallet. That’s a way to solve that problem if for some reason your pallets are getting separated. Even though none should be doing that.
Again there was another similar story but in an international context. This specific customer was shipping from the Netherlands to New Zealand. They would do the same thing and it’s international shipment so it’s even more sensitive because right now it has to go through customs and clear the customs and any other immigration. There are a lot of formalities, even when we come from India we are not supposed to bring certain products and we don’t bring them as they are very sensitive.
If you visit a farm and if you touch some animals and things like that, and if you’re carrying any of those products that you’re not supposed to. We pay carefully to all those things and make sure we don’t do any of that. International shipping is very sensitive, so this customer had a similar problem when they were shipping products from the Netherlands to New Zealand.
These guys were like they would fully shrink wrap the pallet and then they would secure it with the tape on top of it. They can also apply a seal and sealant and there is a seal number that goes within and they can even take a picture of the seal number and say “hey look at it right we did our job right”. Not only that, they can also show it in person in the other country saying “hey look at the condition of the product that left our facility”, likewise to the customs and the immigration authorities.
Whether it’s an international scenario or a domestic scenario if your pallet is getting separated you should not only apply the shrink-wrap, but also fully tape it on all the four sides and even put some extra tape and secure it really well and take pictures and of course upload them to loadproof.com.
Later when you come back to those pictures when the pallets are separated you can show “hey look at how it left our facility and here are the pictures to prove it” and you can show the security tape and how it has been tampered. We can file a freight claim against that saying that’s a violation of their policy, a violation of whatever agreement that you had with your carrier or whoever that is doing the job. It could be somebody else, so this is another best practice that you can follow in case if your pallets are getting separated for whatever reason and you’re wondering how you are going to solve this problem.
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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. 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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