Image Enabling The Supply Chain

  3PL business – your core competence is moving products – you can move products as pallets, as parcel boxes as shipments, as loads – it is all about moving products for other businesses, typically manufacturers or vendors that source product from the far east – because everyone wants to do what they are good at – so as a manufacturer I am good at manufacturing, so I want to find the best 3PL and outsource all my logistics, distribution, delivery, order fulfillment everything to the best in business, so I can do what I do best. An OEM or a Name brand vendor manufacturer is coming to you because they could go ahead and buy 1000 boxes they need to buy, rent the equipment that is needed, get the warehouse space rented out and they can do all by themselves, but if they come to you, they can take advantage of the economies of scale and the logistics expertise you bring to the table, so essentially by coming to you 3PL, they can reduce the cost, so as a 3PL Warehouse Manager you are expe...

  This document describes the capabilities and implementation of an effective chargeback management system. If you review the “Chargeback Management System – White Paper – Part1” and then review this current document, you will get much more value out of this exercise to understand the Chargeback Management System thoroughly. However, it is okay to review this current document by itself as well. If you need access to the Part1 of the White Paper. CHARGEBACK MANAGEMENT SYSTEM What are some of the capabilities that a chargeback management system needs to have? The core of the chargeback system is to have the ability to do the following High-speed picture taking, High speed picture tagging with appropriate meta data, High Speed picture uploading, A failsafe repository of pictures. High speed picture retrieval capabilities and, High speed picture sharing capabilities so that there are no bottle necks added to the current processes. HIGH SPEED PICTURE TAKING This involves capturing the p...

  Your Business You manufacture great products or source great products from the far east and then you ship them to Retailers such as Walmart, Kohls, Home Depot, Lowes, Best Buy etc. and sell your product through them You are essentially paying rent to one or many of these retailers to carry your product on their shelves and make them available for shoppers that come to their stores, so the consumers or shoppers can buy them You ship your product to the Retailers, sometimes you will pay for the carrier and ship your product to the Retailer or sometimes or actually most of the times the Retailer will pick up the product by sending their own transportation company/Carrier from your warehouse as they can take advantage of the economies of scale and get a better transportation pricing, then they will process your product through their Supply chain, then get your product on their shelves and sell them. Meanwhile you will submit your invoice and they will pay your invoice, typically afte...

  Are you still using digital cameras to capture and store photos of your shipments and other processes in your warehouse?  If the answer is “yes”, then there is a better way. Initially, you may not think it’s much to address, but when you think about how many photos are taken each day in your warehouse then there is a lot of time and money that can be saved by switching to a more efficient photo process.  Using digital cameras to capture photos, and PC’s to store the photos of the loads taken during shipment might result in issues such as:  Slow uploading - your camera likely requires a hardwire plug-in through USB. Time-consuming photo tagging - adding reference numbers or labels. Slow retrieval of photos - photos are often hard to search and locate. Sharing photos manually - manually attaching JPEG files to email. Accountability - there is no accountability as you don’t know who worked on the shipment. With an efficient photo documentation system will include: Fas...

  This past summer was fabulous. My brother-in-law got married and so my family got to go to India and participate in a typical South Indian wedding ceremony end to end, including all the pre- and post-wedding rituals, pre- and post-wedding parties, gift giving and receiving, the astrology and horoscope-based ceremonies, the auspicious poojas, and other traditions that the elders insist must be done.  My daughter was very excited. A lot of these traditions stem from past experience that is barely remembered by those present. The ancestral, ethnic, clannish practices and formalities bring two tribes together and restore relationships. Sometimes, cultural differences between the families get in the way, whether its religious beliefs, food customs, or other ceremonial preferences. The two sides don’t agree, with one side insisting that the wedding rituals need to be performed based on their tribal culture while the other says that they won’t participate if a particular ceremony i...

  1. Introduction This is a leading supplier of shelf-stable, dairy based food, and beverage products for large CPG companies, emerging beverage brands, and private label retailers nationwide. The Company is the partner of choice in RTD beverage industry for top brands and private label retailers for food and beverage products including RTD coffees and teas, dips, beer, sauces, and snacks.  They have the expertise necessary to meet highly demanding consumer and regulatory requirements. Their capabilities include retort thermal processing expertise, in-house formulation resources, clean label, and organic production, and more.  Recently, this Food and Beverage Processing Company implemented LoadProof – the centralized enterprise photo documentation system for Food and Beverage products. This document describes the benefits that an effective photo documentation process can bring to avoiding load rejects with retailers. 2. Leading Food and Beverage Processing Company Supply ...

  An Engaging UI UX is a Key ingredient for your Enterprise Supply Chain Apps. A very good UI (user Interface) and hence a very good UX (User Experience) is an important component in improving the warehouse and distribution center productivity. In this day and age where Apple and Android have completely changed the user experience that is so easy to not only understand and use the app within seconds, but also figure out any new capabilities on an intuitive basis using hand gestures such as touches, swipes, pinches etc., it is very important to pay attention to the enterprise apps that are deployed in your Supply Chains today. Particularly in the distribution center, there is significant time that is spent on training the end users. I’ve seen many distribution centers that are literally revolving doors, where personnel come and go. All these personnel go through training for weeks to understand and to improve their proficiency in their work, so that is at least 40 hours spent per em...

  RETAIL CHARGEBACKS SMART GLADIATOR RESOURCES GET A PRICE PARTNERS LOGIN This is another interesting dynamic that we run into when we talk about LoadProof. We work with a lot of these  small organizations  like they have fifty people, hundred people with revenue around 20 million dollars, 50 million dollars, 20 billion dollars like that.  This was an interesting scenario where these people were very much interested in LoadProof, but they were like “oh we ship to this retailer and they don’t even talk to us and they just automatically detect from our invoice”. We don’t know what to do right, so how we saw this is that organization liked your product so much, but somebody thought “hey this is a beautiful product, they looked at all your passion, they looked at your love and they looked at your care with which you make this amazing product, the beauty of the product.  Somebody in that organization fell in love with the product and they said I mean it’s usually a b...

  I would think that electronics OEMs or distributors would be leading the charge toward quality, and I’m sure many of them are. However, the first time I encountered a quality department that did extensive quality control it was in a New Hampshire distribution center (DC) that served the apparel industry. For this manufacturer, the goal was to make fairly priced clothing that delivered good quality to middle-aged women. The Director of Quality at the warehouse, along with her team, did such a good job that this retailer was known for its quality. To meet their quality goals, workers spent a lot of time measuring the tops and pants against strict criteria, checking the cut of the pieces, figuring out how the pieces would look on real people, and making sure that the colors were good for a variety of skin tones. They thought of everything. They took pictures and shared infractions with their vendors across the supply chain. Quality inspection Quality inspection is a relatively simpl...

  This best practice is about something called dimensioning of SKU’s in warehouse. Dimensioning of products is done by capturing the length width and height of the products. Boxes in which the products are being shipped are also dimensioned. These boxes are tracked as they are moved across with products capturing all the dimensions such as length, width, height, weight, volume and also the other attributes. The item master attributes of a product corresponds to the size of the products. Some expensive electronic goods does not come with serial number tracking, and some items will be conveyable and others will be non-conveyable. And also some of the items are easy to sort and some are difficult. All these aspects will be focused as part of the  dimensioning process , because that is the first time the product hits the dock door or product hits the DC. None would have seen the physical nature of the product. The vendor would have probably sent an ASN and you automatically create...

  This is an important decision that needs to be made, while deciding between SAAS and On-Premise option. Even though it seems like everyone is embracing SAAS, but still there are enterprises that are looking at this as a big step. Traditionally the large enterprises have always harbored their data within their IT infrastructure with all kinds of security that encompassed multiple layers of encryption, protection, masking etc., with multiple levels of approval processes and hierarchy-based authorizations etc. So, it is a big step to break away from that culture and getting into a SAAS approach. SAAS has several advantages over the traditional on-premise applications that are listed below. Helps make budgeting simpler. Easy to configure and use. No huge upfront costs. Predictable costs. Shortens the implementation time for projects Highly scalable, with cloud you pay only for what you use, you can even automatically upgrade to next plan when you exhaust resources in current plan. Al...

  Recently, this Leading self-service kiosks and POS manufacturing company implemented LoadProof to improve their supply chain visibility. This document describes the benefits of effective photo documentation that helped this company to avoid damage claims and freight claims.  This company is the world's leading enterprise technology provider of POS software, hardware, and services for banks, retailers, restaurants, small business, telecom and more. They know that digital has changed absolutely how brands perform and having a digital-first mentality is essential to differentiating and attracting more business, even for physical places, it's the way to reach customers at any moment and convert transactions into meaningful experiences.  They create software, hardware, and services that run the enterprise from the back office to the front end and everything in between for their clients. See how LoadProof improved their supply chain operations. Click here to continue reading...

  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 t...