Freight Claims

[Binkspot]

Insurance is cheap, cover the crap out of everything. There are riders available to cover just about anything. Having a good insurance broker is necessary to make sure you have the coverage you need when you need it, one of the best moves we made as a business. We even go as far as getting riders to cover large jobs. Like Rich said let the insurance companies hash it out over a claim just get your check. If the machine is leased or financed the note holder has interest in getting the matter resolved and maybe an asset.

Document everything in a dedicated notebook. Include dates, where, what, when, part numbers, hours spent, etc so when it does come to settle noting if forgotten about.

If it turns out you do have to change out six heads the cheaper route maybe to purchase a used six color press and use it as parts. The print heads are pretty stout and doubt they are damaged to the point of unusable. Like you said it may just be a matter of replacing screen holders, micros, etc which may not be that bad.

[ZooCity]

Day 14 and we are still missing 2 pallets containing all our platens, tooling, tri lock and CTS.  Neither our rep nor the sales manageer at freightquote.com will respond today after saying they would arrive yesterday.   

As an update I would like to extend my middle finger to the two guys assigned to our account at freightquote.com.  Unbelievable the way we are being treated.  Since notifying them of the damage and missing pallets it's clear they have zero interest in helping find our still missing property.  I had to call the cust service line this morning and get random employee to help me track it, which took all of 15 minutes whereas they were saying the pallets were MIA for days or simply not responding.  We did fine with freightquote for many years but the moment something went awry, this is how they behave.  To top it off the sales manager that this was "sent up to" is a childish d bag.  Ugh.  It may be that freightquote would not be happy with this sort of behavior so I should probably escalate it and check with another manager to be fair to them before publicly damning them forever. 

Lessons learned?

• Get it all in writing.  I knew this one, we all know this one, but sometimes it tricky.  I couldn't book this online as usual due to the oversized pallets and it was done entirely over the phone.  The BOL was the only confirmation of anything that we received.  I should have had it all in email.  Never trust a sales person, eh?  The manager I spoke with said "there's no written proof anywhere of the instruction to add insurance, therefore it is not something we are responsible for" I countered " by that logic, nor is there record of the amount we owe you for this shipment, therefore it is not something we are responsible for".  We still have no invoice or detailed quote from the shipping fees.  Even when it's someone you've worked with before, make them email it to you. Anyone who refuses to is probably lying to you and plans to back out of any agreements should they be called upon to fulfill them.
• Increase your off premises property limit on your co. insurance.  Our insurer, Farmer's, has the claim moving forward and so far it's been smooth and they have been very responsive.  Sad thing is that we only had $5k on the off premises property, probably just to cover in town deliveries and such.  Had I raised the limit prior to shipping we could have received all our money back.  Thanks to Rich Hoffman for bringing this up in this thread.  I believe this may be the most foolproof way to protect your inbound freight. 
• Use smaller pallets.  Ones that can be moved with 4' forks wherever possible.  It was the oversized pallet getting forked with short forks that wrecked our shizzle.  If machinery can be broke down to fit on smaller pallets, do it.   If it can't be, consider shipping truckload v. LTL

We also have a lawyer working on our case.  I'm not expecting much to come of that but they seem to think there is an avenue.  Their take on it was essentially that "somebody, somewhere along this shipment, has insurance covering this and we can go after it".  Luckily, it looks like we can get our own insurance coverage paid out, move forward with repairs and getting the machine running and see if anything pans out from legal action to recover the costs that insurance did not.

[tancehughes]

Yeah, freight quote screwed us before too. Never again will I use them. They "attempted" to correct their wrong doing, but it was a bunch of bull. I just go straight to the shipping companies myself and get quotes.

[ZooCity]

That's a shame.  They really made it clear to us they don't give a rip about what happened, where the missing pallets were, etc. 

One thing I forgot to add to that list of lessons learned and I guess it's obvious- always have redundancy or, should you be so lucky, time available when getting into new equipment.  We're ok right now as we have all we need to run still in place.  Losing revenue certainly without the second press and other items but staying more or less on track. Without that redundancy this would be catastrophic for us.

[ZooCity]

So in the end our insurance adjustor actually worked to get this covered under another portion of our policy.  It nearly paid the repair bill to fix 6 of the heads from M&R.   I thought an insurance adjustor's sole job was to pay out less, so I was shickled titless that our guy helped us out so much.

We still lost all the production time, the whole point of buying a nearly new machine used (i.e., immediate shipment) is now moot and my tally sheet has over 3 grand in staff time spent just dealing with this.

My take on shipping and damage is, primarily, that all these people are assholes.  They will destroy your gear and they will lie and point fingers at anyone they can to squirm out of it.  Best to avoid even trying to get them to make good on their responsibilities.

Moving forward I'm taking Rich/244's approach: have a good insurer, have off premises property coverage that meets or exceeds anything you might ship in a term and let the insurer handle it if at all possible.  They will pay you out according to coverage and then subrogate against either the carrier, broker or both to recoup.  We did explore legal action on our own, just spent a couple grand on it for peace of mind and yes, we had a strong enough case for a settlement and would have received one but I doubt it would have been as much as our insurance already paid.  You cannot collect twice, i.e., the insurer gets first dibs on the settlement up to the amount their policy covered and we didn't think it was worth wrestling a high dollar amount out of either company so we dropped it.

Ironically, our Starlight came in last month with the glass shattered to all hell.  I think we just are hexed when it comes to LTL.

[Hey Monkey]

Wow. So sorry you have been going through this. As a new shop that will be buying a lot of new equipment soon I am taking notes!

[ZooCity]

Wow. So sorry you have been going through this. As a new shop that will be buying a lot of new equipment soon I am taking notes!

I hope some of this helps!

[sqslabs]

Man that's a real bummer, but nice to hear you recouped some of it.  I just shipped a dryer up the east coast and by the time they received it the dryer had jumped out if its feet, cracked a 2x4 on the side wall of the crate, smashed one of the door handles and bent up some metal pretty bad.  I'm sure it'll still run fine, but I wonder how any of these shipping companies can stay in business throwing things around like that.

[ebscreen]

Methinks you've got a rowdy forklift op at your local distro center Chris.

[ZooCity]

Yeah, that seems to be the case but we think it might be happening in SLC.  The press heads were loaded  to a container there so our local guys didn't even see the whole situation until we got the first crate out, they had tucked the damaged one behind it and it was impossible to see the extent of the damage.

These companies stay in business because they really are a chain of brokers, carriers and subs.  So some a-hole at a transfer ignores markings on a crate, destroys it and shoves it into a wedge but it's going to be tough and maybe not worth it for the carrier to bother tracking that down.  The Carmack Amendment protects the carriers from culpability for most damages and that along with terms protect the broker, although not in our case. Our insurer will easily get a settlement from either or both parties.

What I don't get is why the rule isn't to stop and hold the cargo if damaged, why are these people just passing it down the line?  I couldn't imagine working like that.

[beanie357]

We have been lucky. Knock on wood.
But we do not use brokers. We deal direct with a carrier that serves our area. Seems to remove a variable.
Incoming garments tend to get more "who is cheapest" action, and an occasional pallet issue occurs, but then, it's not our issue. Whee!!
Incoming garments on fedex or ups freight have been perfect.

[mk162]

i bought a piece of equipment and I couldn't crate it, so I sent a service in to do it.  They handled crating, shipping and delivery.  It was pricey, but it was ALL on them.  I did buy insurance as well.

This was the most amazingly crated piece of equipment I had ever seen.  You could have damn near flipped it over a few times and it still would have been fine.

[tancehughes]

Yeah, I deal direct with freight companies now. No more freightquote.com or anybody like that.

Our gauntlet II just came in and two of the three pallets had slightly collapsed on one side, but I had insurance so I was not too worried about it. Luckily, nothing was wrong with the equipment (that we've noticed so far!)