Friday, December 2, 2011

What's Next When You Suspect Theft in Your Shipping Department?

What's Next When You Suspect Theft in Your Shipping Department?
How often do you check to see if your packages are delivered to the right address? Of if they even make it onto the carrier trucks. And if this is not happening, what to do next?

Re-labeling packages, shipping packages that don't belong to your company, changing addresses, deleting packages - all of these can happen and have happened. You might have years of trusted service from a key employee, you check references, do background checks, put systems in place, but something doesn't seem right. You seem to have too many orders that need to be reshipped. Or your shipping costs seem high according your shipping budget forecast of shipping X number of boxes that weigh Y pounds. This kind of problem can be hard to pin down, even when you see the "red flags" that you are sure mean you have a problem. Here's where multi-carrier shipping software might help you.

In the CPS(TM) shipping software, you have quick access to your shipping history data so you can search and analyze your shipping information. For example, after recently noticing something wasn't right with their shipping, one CPS shipper extracted their shipping data, looked for patterns that did not match their normal shipping, and discovered there was no order ID information with some of their shipping records. More research into these records zeroed in on the problem and helped find the employee responsible. In another instance, shipments for already processed and labeled packages were voided. The addresses were altered at the time of shipping. Even though the shipments were deleted in the CPS shipping software, the labels with illicit addresses were already printed and the package given to the carriers for delivery. With a special setting, CPS wrote the data for every voided package to a file for monitoring. Following this trail of voided packages then led back to the person who was scamming the company. These are examples of looking at the problem "after the fact".

To stop a problem before it happens, one way is to use a data lookup to read the shipping data into CPS, then prevent the shipping software operator from changing or voiding the address in the shipping system. In CPS, there is a setting so if the shipper tries to edit the shipping address fields, a window pops up requiring a password in order to make any change.

It's hardly ever possible to watch what happens to every package in your shipping department. Tools in your shipping system like these in the CPS shipping software give you the power and information to stop these problems if they occur, or even before they occur.

To find out more about the CPS multi-carrier shipping system, visit our web site at www.HarveySoft.com.

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