Retail compliance requirements are more numerous than ever these days, creating challenges for retail vendors as they try to meet routing guide demands and avoid chargebacks. These chargebacks – vendor penalties for not following the retailer’s shipping guidelines – add a layer of stress for retail vendors and a solid revenue stream for the retailers themselves. In this article, we’ll examine the most common retail chargebacks that we see and tell you what you can do about them.
When you entrust your food and confectionery products to a food warehousing provider, you’re relying on that company to be much more than a provider of space. You’re really relying on them to be a partner that will work to protect the integrity of your products through every step of the supply chain. And, while every 3PL warehousing company will promise to be just that, you must find one that truly “walks the walk.” In this article, we identify 5 things that you should look for in a warehousing provider before entrusting them with your food or confectionery products.
Whether it’s your first time outsourcing or you’re changing providers, partnering with a new third-party logistics (3PL) provider is an exciting time for your logistics operation. It is a time for your weaknesses to be turned into strengths and for vital elements of your supply chain to be optimized. As part of this, your 3PL will be focused on enhancing your performance in the eyes of your retailer partners, and meeting – and exceeding – your retail compliance requirements. And it all begins during the onboarding process.
Holding your 3PL accountable to deliver on the service promise can be difficult. However, a key component of that is monitoring key performance indicators (KPI’s).
Does your warehouse or 3PL provider have an internal audit program in place? It is critical for all operations follow standard operating procedures (SOP’s) – that’s how you get to the quality we need to deliver on our promises.
It’s a new year, and with it comes a new cycle for chargeback deductions. Hopefully, if previous errors do not reoccur and the wrongs have been righted, then vendors stand a better chance of warding off chargebacks for 2014.
If your primary focus in reducing chargebacks has been keeping human errors at bay, you may want to refocus efforts on the errors that can arise from an overlooked system or automated function.
We rely enormously on technology to help streamline warehouse processes and create efficiency gains, but often we take these automated processes for granted. Sure, you may encounter an occasional system bug or glitch that you can’t prevent. But what happens if there is an oversight in coding an application? What happens if a retailer updates or makes revisions to their label, paperwork, or EDI requirements and that information fails to pass on to the parties responsible for making the warehouse system changes? This kind of oversight can lead to hundreds or thousands of dollars in chargeback deductions.
To ensure that your technology continues to deliver and not present you with that surprise chargeback, conduct a periodic review of your automated and pre-programmed solutions for vendor compliance. UCC-128 label specifications and paperwork requirements may change over time. If you have these items designed to auto-map data to generate compliant labels or paperwork, it’s essential to have that mapping done correctly. A retailer can change something as small as a character length requirement of a Store/Unit number present on a label. A change this small has large consequences, in terms of chargebacks, due to the high impact of printing numerous labels.
Here are 8 technology-linked requirements for vendor compliance that would benefit from a periodic review:
(Mimi Ma is Director of Quality and Compliance at Weber Logistics)
