One of the challenges in managing international shipments and their paperwork is getting all the piece counts and weights right.
You'd think it would be easy. It's not like shipments have 5 billion pallets or some other too-big-to-manage number. No. Shipments are limited by ocean/air container capacity. For ocean freight, you'll rarely get more than 20 pallets in a 20' container or 40 in a 40' container.
How hard can it be to count to 20 or 40?
Apparently, very hard.
For the last month, all my piece counts have been off. This is a problem because international freight requires paperwork, accurate paperwork, to ship. If the piece counts or weights don't match the steamshipline's or airline's documents it's a No Go on the import side, which makes customers very unhappy and prone to screaming.
In doing root cause analysis, I've come up with the following factors driving these discrepancies:
1.'But wait, there's more' syndrome. Customer can't seem to place just one order, so multiple purchase orders, which all must be consolidated, dribble in. Freight ships and arrives at the forwarder's at different times. Piece counts must be added up across many truck bols. One order has become three, then four, then five. It's the order that will not end resulting in the ever changing piece count.
2.Consolidating outside vendor buys with a third party logistics coordinator. Five vendors with various levels of (poor) customer service, shipping at different times from different places? Oy. Nightmare in the making.
3.Illegible paperwork. Numbers cut off as if the fax machine is also a cropping tool. Bills of lading printed five pages after the toner ran out. This happens more often than you would think.
4.Goods ship, but no one tells me or supplies paperwork. Sorry, my expertise is in international, not telepathy. No paperwork means I can't audit the piece counts my forwarder supplies. No data audit means mistakes happen.
5.Trucker decides to rearrange freight, making 20 pallets 18, and doesn't tell anyone. Or, worse, trucker removes damaged product, discards it, and doesn't say anything. (Are they hoping no one will notice???) Fifty different product skus and three boxes are missing. Great.
So, how do you know which products to take off your paperwork? Open the other 1,050 boxes and take a physical inventory. Fun stuff.
6.And that good 'ol standby: Human Error sometimes presenting as miscommunication or calculator failure.
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