On average, businesses will lose about 5 percent of their shipping costs to damage. However, some businesses waste much more due to an overwhelming amount of goods damaged from impacts and shocks sustained during shipping processes. Shipping is rarely a delicate activity; moving materials and items from there to here requires incredible amounts of handling as well as any number of planes, trains and automobiles. Even packages marked “Fragile” or “Handle with care” are bound to experience more than their fair share of bumps and bruises.
Most business leaders recognize this and take the appropriate precautions to protect their goods from damage during shipment. If you continue to experience undue damage and losses from shocks and impacts, here is what you might be doing wrong with your packaging and transport.
You Lack Information About Shocks and Impacts
Good business leaders thrive on information. The more information you have, the better your decision-making can be. Therefore, if you have little to no information about how shocks and impacts are affecting your shipping process, you won’t be able to make any effective decisions that keep your shipped packages safe. The best solution to this issue is acquiring more information about the journey experienced by your shipped goods, which is usually done with the help of impact sensors.
Impact sensors come in many varieties, but the most common (and most affordable) are stickers or patches with a tube of liquid that bursts when subjected to a specific threshold of force. You might work with staff knowledgeable about your company’s shipping processes to select the sensors most likely to provide useful revelations.
You Leave Empty Space in Your Packages
For the same reason airbags inflate during vehicle collisions, you need to fill your packages and prevent as much empty space as possible. Empty space is bad for shipped goods for so many reasons. In addition to allowing goods to slide around inside their packaging or containers, increasing the number of shocks and impacts the goods experience, empty space does not insulate against changes in temperature, which can also cause harm and result in undue business expense.
Fortunately, there are many affordable packaging fillers to keep your goods safe during transit. These days, many companies are opting for environmentally friendly fill options, such as recycled paper, in response to consumer demand for greater corporate sustainability. However, you should also consider the needs of your goods, which might benefit from molded foam or other custom void filler solutions.
You Aren’t Labeling Your Packages Properly
You might submit a detailed invoice of your shipped goods to your carrier, but unless you carefully label each package, individual handlers will not know to treat your goods any differently than any other box in the shipping container. In addition to impact sensors, which signal to handlers that a package requires special care, you should add “Fragile” labels to your packages. You might consider using containers that have the words and symbols for “Fragile” printed on every side, so handlers are less likely to miss the important message. If only some of your shipments are fragile, you can apply as many “Fragile” labels as you want, as long as they do not obscure the shipping label telling carriers where goods are supposed to go.
You Don’t Take Advantage of Shipping Tech
If your goods are particularly valuable and remarkably sensitive to the slightest bump, you probably need to invest in high-tech shipping tracking tools. Instead of the average run-of-the-mill impact sensor, you might need to consider acquiring GPS monitors, which will send information about your packages back to you (and possibly your carrier’s headquarters) in real time. Advanced GPS shipping solutions can also track temperature and humidity of the environment of your shipment, further safeguarding it against harm. If you receive an alert about excessive shock or impact, you can begin securing the integrity of your goods immediately.
You Invest in Subpar Shipping Services
Shipping is not an area of business service where you can afford to be cheap. If you are paying such low prices for a carrier that it feels too good to be true, you are likely subjecting your shipped goods to a high amount of risk, and you could end up paying much more in damage recovery efforts. The more rigorously you vet your carrier partners, the better, as you are much more likely to end up with carrier services that you can trust.
If you believe that your business is paying too much to recover from shipping damage, you can probably make changes that will save your company money. You cannot eliminate all damage due to impacts and shocks, but with the right shipping strategies, you can make sure your goods are as safe as possible as they travel from here to there.
