It’s ironic, but exceptions happen all the time. We all can relate to these in supply chain operations: the crushed package, the barcode damaged to the point it can’t be decoded, the misplaced or abandoned tote. 

When these errors occur, what happens? The person who discovers it is responsible for reporting it.  How long does that take? Who do they report the incident to? Should they address it themselves?

The reality is that the time a worker spends dealing with that exception is time taken away from the task the worker was assigned. That delay introduces risk to your business. It not only affects team metrics, but potentially delivery commitments or even revenue.

Automating exception reporting

Travel time is lost time in your operations. You can elimate this unnecessary travel time if you can empower the worker to report incidents right at the point of discovery. 

With automation, consider the scenario of a warehouse worker discovering a misplaced box in an aisle. Standing right where it’s discovered, the worker reports what they find – including a photo of the carton, adding the aisle location and any business-specific info, and “send.” 

The worker resumes their assigned task and the form is routed accordingly. In this case, maybe a warehouse manager receives the notification and dispatches a team member to gather and handle the misplaced box accordingly.

And that’s really the key. You need to know about the exception, or else your accounting could be inaccurate, a shipment might be incorrect or some other disruption flows through your operations. But you also need to shift responsibility quickly from any worker who discovers the exception, to the person who can swiftly remediate it. 

A quick hand-off maximizes the time your mobile workers spend on their assigned tasks, while empowering them to report incidents they encounter along the way. There’s good news – you can make this happen.

In-app digital forms

You can now make it easy for supply chain and retail workers to complete exception handling forms within Velocity applications. Without exiting their assigned task workflow, workers can pull up a form, capture a photo (if necessary) forward it on and get back to the task at hand.

By incorporating Ivanti Neurons for IIoT onto the Velocity platform, you can define the routing for various forms, from exception handling and incident reports to inspection forms. Workers don’t have to worry about their completed form getting to the right person. You’ve made sure it gets where it needs to go, automatically.

How much time can you recover in your operations? Let’s figure that out together. Ivanti Wavelink will be at ProMat 2023 in Chicago, March 20-23. Visit us at booth S4718. You can even sign up in advance for a tour of all that’s new as we continue to transform the supply chain worker experience.