Account Audit
Account Audit
One of the first tasks we like to do is undertake a pallet audit for your business. The pallet audit is crucial to understanding your starting position, where to initially concentrate our pallet recovery efforts and to track our process as we start to bring your pallet management back into control.
Audit activity covers three main areas being:
- Process Maturity.
- Functional Operation.
- Functional Administration.
The ‘Process Maturity’ assess the strength of a pallet process and specifically the purpose, context and design. We delve into the dissemination of performance indicators, account ownership and the supporting infrastructure (I.T, QA and HR).
The ‘functional operation’ component assesses knowledge, skills and behaviours across operational segments, and these vary depending on the structure and type of business. It may include:
- Receiving,
- Put Away,
- Pick
- Dispatch,
- Production,
- 3rd Party Storage
- Offsite Warehouse
The ‘functional administration’, again looking at knowledge, skills and behaviours around the peripheral activities of the above, and also looks at:
- Pallet Counts
- Reconciliations
- Referencing
- Query Management
- Document Retention
- Terms Negotiation
- Cost Recovery
- The Output
The resulting report contains a gap analysis specifically identifying remedies and actions by site to achieve a national best practice pallet process. In some instances, we include a time and motion assessment and I think it would be useful here to provide some comfort to stake holders around time investment but also as a reference point for tasks to be completed at site.
Case Studies
National site audits for an Iconic Australian Dairy Manufacturer.
Challenges
A large manufacturer of dairy products underwent an audit by CHEP, revealing losses across multiple equipment types, including Pallecons. CHEP subsequently provided a compensation value.
Objectives
There were two main objectives. Firstly, confirm CHEP’s audit was accurate. Secondly, identify opportunities for recovery before exploring compensation.
Our Approach
We performed equipment counts for all sites and utilized supplier access to compare counts against live online balances. We sought historical transactions to understand fluctuations and identify recovery opportunities.
Findings
After conducting the audit, our results were dramatically different from those identified by the supplier. We identified an improvement to the total units deemed "lost" from 136 Pallecons with a compensation value of $294,963 to 76 Pallecons valued at $183,169.
From our audit, it was evident that errors were made by the supplier which could have incurred unnecessary compensation costs. Some of these errors were:
- Incorrectly identifying equipment types.
- Missing areas or rooms.
- Not taking into account transactions occurring on the date of the count.
Why outsource your audit to us?
- We are impartial. We do not work for CHEP and Loscam.
- There are no “strings attached”. Compensation costs are still made directly to the suppliers.
- Where there are multiple equipment types, if a surplus is identified for one equipment type, we can attempt negotiation to offset the loss of another equipment type.
- We don’t just focus on numbers. We provide recommendations and proactive solutions to improve your internal pallet processes and prevent the future need for an audit.