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You are a Distributor Warehouse Manager, you want to know how to avoid retail chargebacks, freight claims, damage claims and rejected loads | LoadProof

 


Your Business

  • Distribution, you distribute products. You buy products from name brands and manufacturers and ship them to customers that come to you. You carry products from many different brands in your own distribution centers and mostly ship industrial products or consumer products.
  • You could even buy products (electronics, hardware, apparel) products from the far east countries like China, Taiwan, India, Malaysia, Sri Lanka etc. and ship to your customers
  • Your customers could be retailers too
  • You customers are also mom and pop shops
  • You ship both Parcel and LTL.
  • Your customers often complain saying that the products that you shipped arrive completely crushed, almost like a pan cake.
  • As a warehouse manager, you are responsible for the following
    • The 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
        1. Employee hiring
        2. 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

  • You could specialize in many products some of them are
    • Handling Food grade products – FMCG
    • 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
      1. Price Ticketing
      2. Assembly
      3. Special packing
      4. 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

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
    1. Trucking companies
    2. Ocean Carriers
    3. Rail Carriers
    4. Air Carriers
    5. 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 money on Retail chargebacks when you ship to Retailers
  2. You are losing dollars due to freight claims
  3. You are losing money on damages – your customers are submitting damage claims to you
  4. You are losing money on rejected loads
  5. You want to keep that money in your customer’s pockets
  6. So, you started taking photos in your official Digital camera
  7. Some of your people started taking photos in their personal cell phones but the process had the following drawbacks
    • Take photos in a device, either a digital camera or a smart phone.
    • Then you have to save the photos somewhere in a Google drive or Shared drive or Shared Folder.
    • Then manually have to search the photos to find the right ones when there are any questions.
    • Cumbersome to copy the photos from the camera.
    • Time consuming to organize photos for future reference
    • No back up for the photos – What if your computer suddenly crashed?
    • 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 Retail Chargeback?

  1. You are shipping to a retailer
  2. The retailer is either issuing a chargeback or automatically detecting your invoice because they are citing noncompliance or damages
  3. If you have a genuine noncompliance issue based on the retailer’s routing guide, then you have to make sure that noncompliance issue is fixed first. If you are still getting chargebacks and the reasons that you are getting from the retailer doesn’t make sense, then you have to have a conversation with the retailer.
  4. So, you want to have a conversation with the retailer. It is not always easy because they are so big, you cannot get their attention easily, so you start with the pictures of the product you ship. Using Loadproof start taking pictures of the products you ship that demonstrate the condition of the product you are shipping.
  5. When you get a chargeback, you can share those pictures and demonstrate to them saying that the condition was perfectly fine, when the product left your facility
  6. Typically, you will have to submit the pictures through their portal. And with Loadproof you can do that very easily because with all the pictures you have taken, you can generate only one (not too many that complicates the process and requires a lot of labor to be spent just to upload pictures) PDF document and upload that one PDF document into the retailer portal and start the conversation.
  7. Often there are two scenarios at play here. The first scenario is the Retailer paying for transportation, which is what happens most often, and the second scenario is you paid for transportation.
  8. Scenario 1 – The retailer often pays for transportation because they can take advantage of their economies of scale and get a better deal from the transportation company or carrier. The problem is because you don’t have a contract with the carrier you cannot directly file a claim with the carrier. So, you will have to talk to the retailer and prove it to them that it is not your mistake. Sometimes even the insurance companies are involved because the carrier might insure the move, then insurance companies will ask for the pictures, so if you have LoadProof, it is even easier to provide the pictures to the insurance companies. It is not always easy to get the retailer to look into this right away, but work with them, keep pushing back, you might not succeed in the first attempt, but eventually you will succeed.
  9. Scenario 2 – You paid the carrier directly, then you can file a claim against the Carrier and get your damage reimbursed
  10. And also, often Retail Chargebacks come with automatic deductions, which means your Accounts Receivables team is going to see this first. Then they will call you the warehouse manager next to see if you have any proof to show that the warehouse team shipped the product in good condition without any of those damages cited by the retail customer. That is when you can show LoadProof and the pictures you took while shipping that shipment. You can also set up your AR people as users in LoadProof, so that they can login to LoadProof and retrieve the pictures without even calling you. And you can also set up anybody else that requires access to these pictures to show that your warehouse team did a great job. So everyone can push back and say – hey we did our job right, so it is not fair for us to pay for these issues.
  11. Always keep in mind, the Supply Chain is a small community of people, so you are going to see these people again and again and they all make moves and take up different roles in the same industry. So, you will see them again and again, all you have to do is go to a trade show and you will see them, so it is important to maintain the relationships so don’t burn bridges. You are going to see them in a different role at a different 3PL at a different retailer or at a different distributor. So, work with them maintain the relationships professionally, you will not get surprises when they take up other roles and might be on your opposition side. Also in the 3PL industry people jump ship so fast, so always keep that in mind while working with people in Supply Chain, overall your journey within the Supply Chain industry is not a sprint, it is a marathon.
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