It\u2019s been another great week hasn\u2019t it! I\u2019m Marty and I\u2019d like to thank you for joining us again here at Warehouse and Operations as a Career. This week let\u2019s spend a few minutes on controlling expenses. I had a conversation last week with a V.P. of Op\u2019s about a facility that had had over 1000 short on truck cases the previous week. That\u2019s a huge error ratio and creates a very real expense to the company, not to mention the disservice to their accounts. I tell you what, we\u2019ll get into all that in a moment, but let\u2019s start with how we handle wasted expense when it\u2019s our own. I\u2019m certain we\u2019ve all, probably on a daily basis, talked or commented to our kids about leaving the lights on in an empty room, or leaving the A/C running way to cool when no one\u2019s home, or how about running the bath for like 15 minutes before their ready to get in it. All that can be a drain, an actual waste of our hard earned money. By managing those expenses or that waste we\u2019re able to have more and do more right? The same holds true in our work lives, our companies can have more, maybe newer equipment or supplies and share or afford more, those monies we as associates don\u2019t help manage could end up in better wages or incentives for our positions!
\nAbout two weeks ago I was speaking with a building maintenance supervisor, I\u2019ve know him for about 15 years, hadn\u2019t seen him for like 4 years now though, he\u2019s now working in a new industry. I\u2019d known him from the distribution arena and I\u2019d asked him how he was liking the new job. One of the things that he mentioned was how he didn\u2019t miss all the pallet jacks and forklift maintenance he use to deal with. His biggest complaint was always the shrink wrap and cardboard being ran over by the equipment and all the load wheels he\u2019d have to replace and the cost it incurred for his department each month! We can all realize those wheels aren\u2019t cheap, those bearings we burn up each month not only cost a pretty penny but think how much time our equipment\u2019s down while there being repaired. Oh and speaking of cardboard and shrink wrap, these days a lot of companies recycle them, I\u2019m sure we could all pitch in and save a few more bucks by saving as much as we can and getting it to the proper staging area! One of my old pet peeves was the waste of things like tape and rolls of labels. How many partially used rolls of strapping tape or rolls of labels that get changed out too early because we didn\u2019t want to run out during a batch so we just put in a fresh roll! Our one roll doesn\u2019t hurt anything, but multiply that by 60 of us times 6 days and we could have saved the cost of a whole box. It\u2019s hard, I mean we have a task to perform, thinking about expenses and saving or not wasting that money. But I\u2019m sure we can all agree it\u2019d be a win win if we could do a better job at it!
\nSo shorts or not on trucks. The facility I spoke to earlier typically ships around 400k cases a week, with over a thousand shorts or not on trucks that\u2019d be an error ratio of 1 in 400! That\u2019s 1 case out of every 400 didn\u2019t get delivered to the customer. Think about that cost, there\u2019s an expense to get it ordered again, send a selector out to get it again, get it loaded and then driven back out to the account, times 1000 times. I know that\u2019s an exaggeration but wow. A typical error ratio I work with is at a minimum 1 in 3000 and I know accounts that are hitting 1 in 20,000. Those numbers include misships as well. Short on truck and misships are a huge expense, and we can\u2019t forget the impact to the customer. If we take the family out for a nice dinner and the kids want spaghetti but a selector mispulled stewed okra in the can for spaghetti, well that\u2019s not going to be a good thing.
\nOk, so how can those expenses happen, what causes a short on truck and how can we prevent it. And a mispull, how do we grab the wrong thing. If you can answer those questions and eliminate them from the industry you can be a wealthy ...