Chargebacks & Retail Compliance: Prove You Did It Right

Back in the good old days, when I had just arrived in the working world, supply chain management was still a new field. I was working at a new company and we learned new things every day. It was like drinking out of a fire hose, both exciting and challenging. Time just flew by.

Soon, we hit the end of the year and with it the holiday party, complete with all the normal festivities, music, and food. The best part was hanging out with the founder and CEO of the company. We would ask him questions about the promise of the then newly emerging .com boom. The Internet was the big buzz in the Silicon Valley then. It was a time when small companies raised millions of dollars with a PowerPoint presentation.

Meanwhile, he was focused on figuring out the formula, not just for acquiring new customers, but also for delivering in terms of execution. He wanted every deployment to be a huge success, with customers getting measurable return on investment (ROI) and a clear path to solving business problems.

We asked him “What’s our secret sauce? What really contributed to the adoption of our system in the market?” He was clear: it’s the people. He said that the people made sure the systems were installed correctly. They built strong connections with customers, making them feel comfortable with on-boarding the new system. He added that the real reason the company took off was by solving a problem of suppliers to retailers. The biggest retailers (Target, Walmart, Bed Bath & Beyond, Home Depot, Nordstrom, etc.) created thick and complex compliance manuals. For a small seller, managing the requirements of the various retailers was a nightmare.

Labelling was a critical factor. If the wrong label was applied or it was applied in the wrong place, the boxes would not be processed and the supplier wouldn’t be paid.  Suppliers, then, have programmers tasked with programming the necessary labels for each retail outlet. Staying up to date with shifting requirement was no easy task. Our system, out of the box, was compliant with the top 100 retailers—so it was an easy sell.

These companies understood the high cost of mistakes. Retailers would routinely apply chargebacks, a penalty or fine applied when a supplier doesn’t company to some requirement. Large retailers process billions dollars of merchandise through their supply chain, so compliance is critical to efficiency.  Misapplied labels translate to good being delivered to an incorrect location, as well as increased delays, labor, and costs. Other times, the transportation provider or someone else in the chain dropped the ball and a shipment was delayed. In those cases, a chargeback on the supplier was levied.

Today, with an image enabled supply chain, every involved party handling the merchandise can take pictures of the goods and document the completion of their tasks and hand the goods to the next party in the chain. The shipment reaches the right destination on time fully compliant with the requirements of the retailer. A nicely documented picture with a date and time stamp is a perfect system of record for every involved party.

Chargebacks are an everyday event for most manufacturers. From 5% to 15% of all invoices are affected by chargeback deductions, amounting to from 4% to 10% of all open items on accounts receivable, according to the Credit Research Foundation, a financial-industry group tracking credit issues. Chargebacks are also a serious expense. Chargebacks typically shave off 2% to 10% of a manufacturer’s overall revenue, according to the National Chargebacks Management Group (NCMG) of Charlotte, N.C.

“While the uncontested chargebacks are troublesome enough, things can get ugly when a manufacturer feels the chargeback is inaccurate–that they delivered as required, but someone on the retailer’s end made a mistake. There are cases when chargebacks are totally justified, but errors happen in both directions,” said Ralph Sullivan, executive director of the NCMG. “About 10% of manufacturers successfully challenge a chargeback in a given year, but to prevail, they have to have good documentation proving their claim, and it’s not always available,” Sullivan added.

The charges can add up:

  • A typical charge for carton (labeling) violations is a minimum of $100.00 per shipment, versus $5.00 to $7.50 for every carton in the shipment.
  • The placement of the packing slip, when required, is important and varies from operator to operator. A violation here could cost $250.00 per shipment with some operators.
  • Failure to comply with the correct bill of lading (format) could trigger a $150.00 charge per shipment.
  • Multiple violations on a single purchase order can result in multiple chargeback deductions. A 100-carton order with a misplaced packing slip, bad carton labels and no VICS Bill of Lading could cost you a deduction of $1,150.00. It pays to make sure you are doing it right before it goes out the door.

An efficient image-enabled supply chain lets users to take pictures that will serve as reference able document that can be produced to refute any chargeback situations. Typically, the pictures are taken when the load leaves the shipper’s dock by the shipper as well as at the time of delivery by the transportation service provider when the load was delivered at the customer’s receiving dock door.

How have you overcome your compliance requirement challenges in your supply chain? What tools have worked for you? Is that still a major pain? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

26
Aug 2018
By Puga Sankara36 Comments
Author:
Puga Sankara
About:
Puga Sankara is the Founder, CEO of Smart Gladiator LLC. Smart Gladiator designs, builds, and delivers market-leading mobile technology for retailers, distributors, and 3PL service providers. So far, Smart Gladiator LoadProof has been used to ship, receive, and scan more than 100 million boxes. SG LoadProof is a patent pending Centralized Enterprise Photo/Video Document System on Cloud for Supply Chain. SG LP is built on the fact that photos & videos are vital docs as important as POs/SOs/Legal Contracts/Fulfillment Orders that reside in ERP/WMS/TMS systems, that serve as compelling, conclusive, unequivocal proof of crucial, critical, vital operations executed in Supply Chain within/across orgs when fulfilling customer orders as well as meeting contractual obligations between orgs as merchandise is transferred between different parties that partake in Supply Chain functions & operations. And these photos/videos data should not be stored in someone’s Smartphone or Email Inbox or in their personal/work Computer, but should be stored in a Centralized Enterprise system, where such data can be pushed into super-fast, stored securely, accessible to all stake holders (CFO/Sales Reps/Customer Support/AR/AP) in an org, as well as facilitates super-fast retrieval/sharing. LP is an Enterprise System of record for Photo/Video docs & is as important as an ERP which is an enterprise system of record for POs, SOs, Legal Contracts between parties etc. that have huge legal ramifications, also as important as a WMS (Warehouse Management System) that hold indispensable shipment & fulfillment data on orders. Like how Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat etc. have evolved into social media platforms/systems that enable individuals to showcase their beauty/pretty clothes/lovely cosmetics/hep coolness etc., LoadProof is an Enterprise system that holds similar photos/videos, but for a different reason, not for show off, but to serve as compelling, conclusive, unequivocal & indisputable system of record and proof that can be presented even in the court of law, when there is a dispute between parties while they execute many facets of the Supply Chain functions & operations. SG LoadProof is also an Enterprise System of Record for Photos, videos and any other digital documents for your Supply Chain Network. A system of record (SOR) or source system of record (SSoR) is a data management term for an information storage system (commonly implemented on a computer system running a database management system) that is the authoritative data source for a given data element or piece of information. The need to identify systems of record can become acute in organizations where management information systems have been built by taking output data from multiple source systems, re-processing this data, and then re-presenting the result for new business use. In these cases, multiple information systems may disagree about the same piece of information. These disagreements may stem from semantic differences, differences in opinion, use of different sources, and differences in the timing of the extract, transform, and load processes that create the data they report against, or may simply be the result of bugs. The integrity and validity of any data set is open to question when there is no traceable connection to a good source, such as a known System of Record. Where the integrity of the data is vital, if there is an agreed system of record, the data element must either be linked to, or extracted directly from it. In other cases, the provenance and estimated data quality should be documented. The “system of record” approach is a good fit for environments where both: 1. there is a single authority over all data consumers, and 2. all consumers have similar needs Here, LoadProof is the System of Record for pictures and videos for all the entities in Supply chain who uses pictures and videos to track using any Supply Chain System infrastructure. 1. LoadProof provides accurate, thorough, complete, and latest information in pictures and videos related to any entity in the Supply chain that is tracked. 2. LoadProof is the single authority on pictures and videos related to any entity in the Supply Chain that is tracked 3. LoadProof doesn’t let any external system to copy the records being stored in it, which eliminates the data being duplicated in multiple places to preserve the data integrity and credibility. 4. LoadProof has a secured login procedure which lets only users with select level access to view the data and modify the records which helps in maintaining LoadProof is becoming the Industry Standard System for Photo & Video Docs for Supply Chain Smart Gladiator is located in ATDC - Advanced Tech Dev Center (tech Incubator) in Georgia Institute of Tech. Click for a demo - https://loadproof.com/apply Puga is a supply chain technology professional with more than 25 years of experience in deploying capabilities in the logistics and supply chain domain. His prior roles involved managing complicated mission-critical programs driving revenue numbers, rolling out a multitude of capabilities involving more than a dozen systems, and managing a team of 30 to 50 personnel across multiple disciplines and departments in large corporations such as Hewlett Packard. He has deployed WMS for more than 30 distribution centers in his role as a senior manager with Manhattan Associates. He has also performed process analysis walk-throughs for more than 50 distribution centers for WMS process design and performance analysis review, optimizing processes for better productivity and visibility through the supply chain. Size of these DCs varied from 150,000 to 1.2 million SQFT. Puga Sankara has an MBA from Georgia Tech. He can be reached at puga@smartgladiator.com or visit the company at www.smartgladiator.com. Also follow him at www.pugasankara.com. [Read More]
More articles by: Puga Sankara

36 Comments

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