Last year our carriers sent us about a hundred and ninety thousand pounds of adjustment charges. Each one is small: a parcel declared at four kilos and weighed at six, a box declared inside one size band and measured into the next. They arrive monthly as a spreadsheet attached to an invoice, and for four years finance paid them, because checking them was nobody's job.
When we finally looked, the parcels were not the problem. Our product master holds a weight and three dimensions for each of roughly fourteen thousand lines. Those figures choose the carton, decide which carrier service an order goes on, plan how many pallets fit on a trailer, and produce the delivery charge a customer is quoted. We checked a sample of four hundred with a scale and a tape measure. A little over a third were wrong by more than ten percent. Some held the weight of an outer case against a single unit. Some had been copied from a similar product when the line was created. A handful had been supplied in pounds and loaded as kilograms.
What interested me more was that the carriers had been telling us this all along. Every adjustment line carries our reference, what we declared and what they measured. In effect it is a free audit of our product master, carried out on every parcel we send, and for four years it went to accounts payable, who did the right thing with an invoice and paid it. The team that owns product data never saw a single line.
The adjustment file now loads automatically into an exceptions queue owned by the product data team, grouped by product, so a line that attracts three adjustments in a month is corrected at source instead of being paid for again. The first delivery of any new line is measured at goods in on a dimensioning station that cost less than two months of adjustments. Suppliers whose data is repeatedly wrong receive a quarterly list with their name on it. And the carton selection rules flag any order whose declared weight looks implausible before it is packed.
Adjustment charges are down by about three fifths, and the trailer plans have become noticeably less optimistic.
The correction to our product data had been arriving every month for four years. It came in the form of an invoice, so it went to the people whose job is paying invoices.
– Serguey Shinder
