Using Google Drive in Warehouse

Here is another interesting dynamic about LoadProof. Apparently somebody in their organization is interested and somebody saw the value of the product – LoadProof provides. 

We get to talk to them and they’re curious. They want to learn more, and in our conversation this comes up: “hey we already use Google Drive, and we store pictures in Google Drive and and it was great for us”. This was actually a very interesting story. An intern from Georgia Tech, pretty smart kid, but they don’t understand all the implications of using an enterprise system for a recognized supply chain environment. In an established supply chain network, you’re dealing with so many different partners such as vendors, customers, transportation service providers, lumpers, etc., Supply chain is a huge community. 

When you spend some time in the industry you understand all these different players and how to work with them and how to maintain the data integrity and still do business maintaining the collaborator competitor dynamic and all that. So obviously I mean without experience it’s difficult to understand. We ended up having this intern that was talking about Google Drive and they were storing the pictures there. But that’s only the storing part alone. It is not going to help them, as they have to retrieve those pictures pretty fast. You don’t want to spend hours and hours looking for those pictures searching for those pictures within Google Drive. Also you want to tag those pictures with the right metadata that’s important because that will make everything easy. In case when you have a claim or chargeback tomorrow you want to be able to search those pictures for that specific sales order. 

You can focus for that specific purchase order or for that specific sale it was delivered by the specific carrier or for that specific Bill of Lading. Because that specific delivery is what you delivered to the customer. That’s what you’re tracking the product within your SAP or whatever WMS or TMS you are using. The retrievability is very important also on top of that we provide easier retrievability with email notifications and people love this. We got these recent customers that signed up. 

What they say  “hey I love everything that I want every time I load send an email to this person right give me somewhere to set this up and send an email to this person because not only we loaded everything and shipped the real product perfectly through our carrier that we are using. But electronically we also want to tell with this proof saying that “hey look at the condition of the product so we don’t want to talk about chargebacks, claims, and damages I mean we did our job great right so that’s why it’s not saving $50,$100, and $200 – but it’s about enterprise system of record especially when you’re shipping very expensive products. 

You’re going to lose a ton of dollars if there is damage, there are a lot of things that happen in the supply chain I mean you are shipping the product, the product left your facility and you did your job right but what happens is if it’s an LTL scenario you its could be a multi stop scenario. The driver goes to stop one delivers stop one product, he goes to the next stop delivers two products and then he goes to stop three, delivers stop three products or it could be a scenario where you outsource someone and those guys have something called a cross dock facility. 

They normally cross-dock or move pallets. They don’t break open the pallets, but sometimes you know you get a surprise. Sometimes they de-palletize, which means the chances are more that they touch your product merchandise. The more chances of damages occurs when they de-palletize. They open it and then break down the pallets and build different size pallets and then put it back again and then it gets delivered. Not only your pallet integrity is gone, not only you can say “hey I delivered this pallet but 20 boxes or you cannot even define the number of boxes. You want to make sure none of that happens. We had another interesting scenario where these guys were shipping child products and the carrier didn’t know about it. 

They just started stacking something else on top of it and when it arrived at the retailer it was broken because it had a top-heavy item which broke the products. If you keep something and this is all happened in spite of having that fragile notice on that on that product. So that’s why it’s important to capture this documentation. I mean the Google Drive is not going to help for you to store this. It’s not only about storage but also about the retrievability later when you need it. 

The notification to people about this is “hey look at this” and I mean you can take all these pictures, copy those pictures to computers and then add it to your email and then send it and what happens to emails with such big attachments is they clog the email server and often they end up in trash or they don’t even get delivered. You have to talk to their IT department. They bring all these people together to get this piece of enterprise records which is important information so you don’t want to go through all that. That’s why LoadProof is another good repository so you can store all that and retrieve it fast. 

Not only that, you can also send email notifications to people that need to know about this shipment that’s left your facility on its way to the other facility. That’s why Google Drive is not a good solution. I mean it’s a great great tool, it’s free and it’s available for everybody. All you have to do is go to Google and upload it, but it’s not a great solution. Because it’s not easy to retrieve and you don’t have email notifications. I mean that’s just two reasons but they’re a lot more. I know the reasons I can give. So don’t approach it as if hey I am going to save these 50 bucks. Have solid proof that I know those are enterprise systems of records that can be even integrated to your TMS, WMS whatever. It’s important sensitive information to cover your side of the story so you can prove to people that “hey we did our job, we did a great job and we shipped a great product so that’s why Google Drive is not a great solution. You have to look at LoadProof and take advantage of all the capabilities that come with it and of course thank you for taking the time to watch this video please let us know if you have any questions any comments in the section below.