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b'Thanks for joining us today, we really appreciate you listening and all the Likes and Follows. The comments and questions we receive are really interesting & I hope we\\u2019re getting you the information and answers you need to plan out your careers & make informed decisions towards your jobs and advancement. I\\u2019m Marty and welcome back to Warehouse and Operations as a Career, where we discuss and share experiences on some of the many Warehouse, Transportation & Operations positions each week, talking about everything from General Labor positions to Upper Management & how to use experiences, learned knowledge, keywords & self-education through the operations positions to advance or turn that Job into that Career! We certainly don\\u2019t claim to be experts on any subject but we have lived it and will honestly share our experiences, thoughts and probably too many opinions on the subject\\u2019s each week.
\\nToday I thought we\\u2019d talk about the positions of the returns and salvage departments. I personally think these tasks are great positions, good to break into warehousing and transportation and both can be doorways into Management positions as well. One of our listeners was asked if they\\u2019d like to move from Lumping or Unloading to the Salvage area, the question was if this was under the Sanitation department and would it be considered a promotion. Of course every facility is structured differently but typically I\\u2019d answer no, in my experiences and what I see most of the time is they both normally fall under the Warehouse. In the Distribution world Returns are usually generated through the Transportation tasks, or Sales and Will Call to a lesser degree & Salvage is a product of Shrink to the Operation.
\\nLet\\u2019s talk about Returns for a minute. Returns are brought back from the various deliveries or by sales and could include anything invoiced by the warehouse and never picked up or even a product brought back to the building by the customer or purchaser. This area is typically separated from or away from the inbound and shipping areas. Depending on your industry this could be a requirement by one of several regulatory agencies due to things like Lot Code or Production dating, batch or run numbers or things like country of origin even. Some products require forms to be filled out and certain documentation restrictions like confirming the product is sealed and no evidence of tampering has occurred.
\\nAs Return associates it may be our job to confirm the item was removed from an invoice at the attempted point of delivery, probably apply a system or accounting code as to the reason of the return, assess wither it is viable and re-saleable and enter its count back into our Inventory System. In a directed environment, meaning everything must have a receiving tag which besides just giving us a slot location we may have to collect lot numbers, expiration dates etc again so our system can track it. Usually the returns process is turned each shift, meaning we\\u2019ll need to work hard to see that everything in our department is reviewed, invoice and billing was adjusted correctly & it\\u2019s receiving and Inventory procedures are complete. In several facilities I\\u2019m familiar with it\\u2019s our job to properly put the product away as well, or get it to the selection slots.
\\nThe Salvage department is a separate area, some location locate returns and salvage in close proximity to each other but the workloads a kept apart. Salvage doesn\\u2019t necessarily mean the way it sounds. In our examples we\\u2019re thinking of saving the product, or saving the loss of product or value, helping reduce the expense for our company really.
\\nSay a case is damaged on the dock during loading, it\\u2019d be taken to the salvage area or if we\\u2019re running or hauling off the dock with a pallet jack and our load isn\\u2019t real secure and the corner case falls off and is damaged we\\u2019d take it to the salvage area or maybe if we\\u2019re operating a fork lift and we smash it,'