How Images can Help You Stay Away from Chargebacks

How Images can Help You Stay Away from Chargebacks | LoadProof

A picture is worth a thousand words and a story is worth a thousand pictures. It’s little wonder, then, that people often long to describe a problem with a picture. In their personal lives, technology savvy people snap a picture and send it off to get a problem solved. And yet, within the supply chain, no vendor has included end-to-end image tracking for stock keeping units (SKUs) as part of the base functionality of their product.

In the early days of our company, we shared information about our minimum viable product (MVP) within our network. A West coast manufacturer was interested in testing our product, so we did a pilot in the organization’s warehouse and everyone there loved it. During a pilot post mortem, the customer shared headaches associated with chargebacks.

These folks ship a lot to Walmart, Target, Macys, and several other retailers and charge backs amounted to $300,000 annually. Our picture-based documentation capability could at least reduce charge backs to a reasonable level. Prior to system implementation, a camera operator with a single camera went to the outbound shipping dock to take pictures of every shipment leaving the facility. This worker’s day consisted of loading the pictures from a memory card to a PC, putting them into a shared folder for everyone to access, and then going back to the loading dock to take more pictures.

Unfortunately, this process created a bottleneck, especially during the peak shipping time in the evenings when shipments get ready to leave. The single operator/single camera system was simply too slow. In the end, the company abandoned the process, deciding that it created more problems than it solved. The goal behind taking pictures was to document and show customers that the shipment left their facility intact. If the vendor claimed issues when the shipment arrived at their end, it was documented that the goods had left the dock in good condition. It put the problem of the charge back squarely with the transportation service rather than the manufacturer. With the new system, every operator had a wearable device that could take a picture as an integral part of the loading process, and then execute the close load function in the warehouse management system (WMS).

Click here to continue reading this article.

Comments

5 reasons why you should switch from using your digital camera right now | LoadProof

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...

Are you still using google drive in your warehouse? | LoadProof

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 ...

Implement Advance Shipment Notice in Your Warehouse with these Best Practices | LoadProof

We’re going to discuss another best practice that you can implement in your distribution center (DC). These practices need some more work to implement, like you have to design your systems, your process and so forth. This is not something that you can implement tomorrow or day after tomorrow, without process changes, systemic changes. But this is good to know because when you’re upgrading next time or when you’re implementing a brand new WMS for your distribution center this is something definitely you want to think about. This is about the best practices in using ASN. An ASN is called an Advance Shipment Notice, that means you are getting a notice ahead of time that what is going to come to your Distribution Center (DC). It means what are the benefits of knowing what is going to hit your DC, your receiving dock. There are a lot of benefits when you have that information in prior, you can plan better in terms of receiving, have people ready to receive the product and you can plan...

Image Enabling The Supply Chain

Search This Blog