At Relogistics, we are committed to helping customers evaluate data to determine their specific needs. Director of Retail Operations James Tankersley shares more about how our vendor compliance program monitors the quality of pallets being shipped to our customers' warehouses, ultimately increasing their efficiency.
Watch the video to learn more. Transcript follows below.
All customers have a vendor requirement for pallets, and what the Vendor Compliance Program does is it checks those pallets on the receiving docks to make sure that the vendors are shipping in on pallets that they're contracted with the customer to ship in with.
How does Relogistics track vendor compliance with its proprietary software?
It tracks the pallets that we handle through Total Pallet Management (TPM). Sort, repair, and things like that. It captures every category of everything that we handle. With that said, it has a vendor compliance piece to it, where it captures all the data that our employees are getting from the license plate, the purchase order (PO) number, the vendor, and anything else like that. As our employee is inspecting a pallet, they can also put in notes. How bad that pallet is, if it has a broken stringer, if it has a missing board. Also, our employees take a picture of that pallet from different angles so you can see the damage, and the customer gets all that information.
How does vendor compliance ensure safety?
What we see in the Vendor Compliance Program, a lot of times, is vendors shipping in on a substandard pallet that causes safety issues. The Vendor Compliance Program will recognize that, and identify it quickly before it gets out on the customers or in the customer's DC and in their rack.
What can customers expect during a vendor compliance audit?
We do what we call spot vendor compliance audits for our customers, and that's where they might not necessarily want to fund a full-time vendor compliance program, but they will want to do spot checks throughout their affiliation. So we'll go in, and we will spend sometimes a week, sometimes two weeks, in that location. We will have our Vendor Compliance Team in there conducting vendor compliance for them for that time period, and all that data goes back to the customer. Then, the customer evaluates the data to determine if vendor compliance is something they want to do monthly, quarterly, bi-annually in DCs because they get a good sampling size of what pallets have flown through their supply chain.
If you're looking to improve your efficiency with our vendor compliance program, get in touch with our team.