Take the Blindfold Off Your Warehouse Operation
From Zero Injuries to Future-Ready Ops: Inside CJ Logistics with Karl Ziarko
What does it really take to run a world-class warehouse operation—one that’s not only injury-free for over a year, but also ready for whatever the future throws at it?
In this episode of Warehouse Visionaries, Evan sits down with Karl Ziarko, General Manager at CJ Logistics America. From his rise through the ranks to leading a multi-customer facility, Karl opens up about the real-world challenges of building a safe, high-performing warehouse—and how to tackle them head-on.
Karl shares how his team has maintained a stellar safety record, what blind spots most GMs overlook, and how technology like OneTrack is helping them see—and solve—problems faster than ever.
You’ll learn:
- Why safety begins outside the four walls, from icy parking lots to inbound trailers.
- How employee-led safety committees build deeper buy-in and accountability on the floor.
- The hidden risks behind “normal” behaviors—like driving off a dock plate—and why they’re worth correcting before disaster strikes.
- How Karl’s team uses real-time video, operator coaching, and simple thank yous to reinforce positive behavior change.
- Why the warehouse of the future isn’t all robots—it’s a smart blend of people and tech that gives you instant visibility into people, product, and processes.
“We get good at bad processes. But if we challenge the ‘way we’ve always done it,’ we unlock safer, more productive operations.” — Karl Ziarko
If you’re serious about reducing injuries, driving productivity, and staying future-ready, this episode is packed with proven strategies from someone doing it every day.
Transcript
Evan: What does the warehouse of the future mean to you?
Karl: It'll always be a combination of people and technology, and filling in those gaps that we face daily. OneTrack is working with us so that every pallet we load gets a picture taken. Those are the very first phase of the warehouse of the future, right at your fingertips.
If a customer asks for their bill of lading, with one click of the button, they have all that information. They need quicker, faster, and more accurate data to address any gaps that a customer may need.
Evan: Alright, this is Warehouse Visionaries. I'm Evan from OneTrack, and I'm going to sit down today with Carl Ziarko, the General Manager with CJ Logistics America. And we're going to be talking about the challenges, surprises, and successes of running a top-tier warehouse operation, from tackling safety to productivity blind spots. Finally, what his thoughts are on the warehouse of the future. So Carl, I appreciate you joining me today.
Karl: Thank you for having me.
Evan: Awesome. So to kick things off, how about you tell everyone a little bit about who you are, where you came from, and then what you're doing now with CJ?
Karl: My name is Carl Ziarko, and I graduated from DePaul University in the city of Chicago. I started my career in manufacturing, but quickly made my way over to the distribution side of the business.
I joined CJ in July of 2016 as a second shift supervisor. I started at our Elwood facility, had the opportunity to become an operations manager there, and then had the opportunity to become a general manager at the Romeoville facility in June of 2022, overseeing a multi-customer site.
Evan: Nice. Really climbing up the ladder there. What's one thing from making that jump from supervisor to ops manager or general manager that you didn't expect or maybe caught you by surprise? I always say you don't know what to expect till you get in the seat. So what changed when you got in the seat from when you were on the outside looking in?
Karl: Yeah, I've always felt like you get exposure at all different levels, but realistically, I felt like a few times you just get everything in place, get the job, and then when you get promoted, you kind of get that exposure moving up. Every level, level. It's just good to be at the ground level, you know?
It's very good to understand the day-to-day life of the employee. Really helps kind of guide the day and really helps guide them. But you know, I think getting to the general manager role, you kind of realize we have an amazing support between our IT and finance and obviously my mentors and my bosses, but it kind of ends with you at the general manager role.
You know what I mean? Directly over all the operational and financials of the building. Just diving into that, there's a lot to digest, a lot to dissect there. But that was what I think caught me off guard was, you know, the goal is always to fix it at my level with the support I have and then, you know, to only bring in my direct supervisors if needed.
Evan: Yeah, it's the old saying, like, the buck stops with you. You are kind of on the line even though you're not the one packing the orders and shipping out orders. You are, at the end of the day, responsible for the performance of the building. So I'm sure that's an interesting balance to strike there.
Karl: Exactly.
Evan: What are some of those big challenges that you face as a GM? What's, uh, what keeps you up at night when you're thinking about your operation?
Karl: Honestly, it always comes down to safety. Right? And you know, more with safety, it's the uncontrollables, right? So the other night, for example, what kept me up was we had an ice storm come through here.
As much as you plan for it — we have a vendor that salts the lot. They do an excellent job. It's the uncontrollables of safety that keep you up at night. I mean, are the employees gonna be safe on their way to work? Did the salt company, did they get every curb when the ice was here?
You know, so it's really those double, triple checkings to make sure that everyone's safe. Everyone leaves the way they came in. I would say it's definitely safety that keeps me up at night. We have a good team that reacts accordingly. A good leadership team that knows how to react to the volumes and anything the customer throws at us. But you know, always that safety first mindset is what keeps me up at night.
Evan: I mean, I always think about within the four walls, right? Someone steps in, then safety starts. But it's really the parking lot, the drive to work and everything that you, you're focused on. 'Cause if somebody doesn't show up to work, that's gonna affect everything.
So it's, uh. How many layers back safety can really go when you start peeling back that onion?
Karl: Yeah, and it's like I said it. It's the uncontrollables too, right? We control what's in the building, right? We control the movement. To your point, it doesn't start and stop just in the building. It's the employees coming to work and home, the trailers they're going in, how the weather impacts that all around.
Evan: Well, speaking of things you can control, I think I saw that your site specifically is over one year without an injury, which is, I mean, that's pretty impressive. You don't see a ton of that in the industry right now. So first congratulations. I think my next question is what are some of the things that you do as the leader of the site to instill that culture of safety. Like I said, you're not the one doing the work. You have to rely on a team to do it. But what are you doing from a leadership level to help your team kind of take that next step in this culture of safety and incident free operations?
Karl: I think it just comes down to, you know, the consistencies and the daily wins. The daily challenges, and how do we be better than we were the previous day? And it really starts with the leadership team, right? They get all the credit for the one year and the employees themselves being safe. 'Cause you know, as much as we set up the environment to be safe, and we have those touch bases and checkpoints, we do rely on those employees when they leave the conversation after they clock in and get on that lift, they need to be safe, right?
So some of the things the leadership team has done is follow the company policies. Really, the company lays out a good glide path for you to have those touch bases. Once a month, you have the safety committee, a layout on how the employees lead those, take over those and really taking it to the next level where not only the employees are part of the safety committee, but they're leading it, and then they're helping us with that messaging to the floor.
Right. So I think sometimes as leaders, you know, you could get caught up in "this is the way it should be," but then, you know, it's really nice when you bring those employees in and they tell you "this is actually what's going on." And it's really getting the buy-in from the floor that helps that.
And you know, the company does a really great job of providing us resources to celebrate those milestones. And you know, when you have a full culture of safety, the employees start helping you manage that culture. Right? They start giving more recommendations and then when they see those recommendations come to light, that even motivates them even more. That "I have a voice here, I have a word in the way things can turn out."
So, you know, we, the, the, like I said it, it's all credit to the leadership team and the employees. 'Cause the employees are now telling us, "Hey, you know, this operator, we feel as though they're driving a little unsafe." And then how it gives us an opportunity to go speak with that employee.
And then of course, like I said, you know, obviously with the introduction of OneTrack really helps us get that insight into what the employee is, put ourselves in that driver's seat of the employee and really can help manage those behaviors and course correct those behaviors as well that we see.
Evan: Yeah, I mean I think every safety leader I've talked to really talks about that bottoms up, right? You have to get the people doing the work bought in. It's really hard to put down a policy that's perfect on paper. Then the person who actually is doing the work is like, "I can't do my job that way. That's just not how it actually looks on the floor."
So it's, I think it's super important that you have to bring the, like, the actual operators and associates in who are getting the job done every day, get their buy-in and feedback on, here's what's going wrong, here's where the bottlenecks are. 'Cause otherwise, I mean, everyone talks about the perfect process and processes are only good until something changes. And then like we know in a warehouse, things change constantly. So you have to have that constant ear to the ground on what is actually happening, what's actually keeping operators from being unsafe.
A lot of times it's not because they want to be unsafe, it's because either they don't know any better. Maybe they came in from another building that let them do things a certain way. Maybe it's the racks are too close together and they keep bumping into it when they back up and there's a different way they should be maneuvering. There's just so many different factors, but you don't really know until you talk to the operators, which is, it's such a novel concept, but like that's what really separates good from great safety culture in my opinion.
Karl: Yeah, and I think one of the biggest lessons there is we are creatures of habit. So, you know, we do get good at bad processes, right?
So the funny thing that I always tell employees is, you know, really think about all the processes you do and the day-to-day activities that you complete. And if you have to do a back flip before every time you load a pallet, start questioning that.
I know it's easy to fall into those types of behaviors because we fall back on, you know, the common saying of, well, this is the way we've always done it, but that's what we challenge them to is, well, let's rethink that way. We've always done it. Is there a better way? Is there a safer way or is there something that you just feel like you need to escalate to us and really, you know, showing and proving to the employees that only, not only do they have a voice, we'll turn those voice and those ideas into actionable items.
And that's really where you see the employees start to almost take over the process themselves. 'Cause it's, there's buy-in, there's ownership to it. So it, it's pretty awesome to see that and to see the employees get excited about their ideas coming to light.
Evan: Nice. No, I love that. So what, what are some of those kind of out of the box things that maybe you're trying in your building that. Or maybe that you've actually implemented that have made a difference, whether getting employee buy-in, maybe it's like a new program, safety program that you've brought in. What, what are some of those things that, that you think have been super successful helping you kind of push the boundaries when it comes to that, that safety culture, and then also just helping be efficient and productive.
Karl: Realistically, what we get a lot of is, you know, I understand the manufacturer created this. I understand they shipped it to us, boxed it to us, but it doesn't work three high, you know what I mean? It's, it's, hey, we understand we have to work in this area, but can we draw a line in our layer area that the clamp isn't able to reach? So we know not to cross that line. You know, it's all the little things.
It's, you know, we understand we have the OneTrack system right here. Can we have a legend or a guide to tell us when to go into which, indirect at what time? And I think focusing on the process and not the speed of anything or the, you know, "no do it faster" mentality. And I think realistically what the employees have been able to help us with is at the start of meeting, right, the messaging. Let's do this message. Let's take some of these words out, change these words, and really help us with the messaging, right?
And I think that's where we've seen a powerful impact. The employees watching their peers present and have them guide us. But like I said, there's so many little day-to-day things. I think of, we have to label for a certain customer. Right. And we used to do it on the dock and you know, the employees came to us and said, the employees are being safe and we're being safe with those employees on the dock, but is there a way we could separate that process to where they're not on the dock? So we created a separate area where the employees now label those cases.
We turn them into outbound staging lanes so we could load right from there. So it's kind of separating, you know, the individuals on the Jeep, the individuals off the Jeep. So it's really, like I said, a lot of comes from that, asking them to revisit and rethink their day-to-day activities and what can we do better.
Evan: So you, you mentioned something earlier about this phrase, "in the driver's seat," which I love, and I've heard you say that a couple of times before we've talked off camera. What are some of those stories about how you've been able to kind of be in the driver's seat? What have you seen, what have you noticed that maybe you wouldn't have noticed before? And what has your team done to fix that, to then make it better for next time?
Karl: Yeah, I think what you'll see from the OneTrack system on the platform under the safety events is we see the most common is operators driving off the side of the dock. So the dock plate, you know, pops up, falls down on the back end of the trailer. You kind of have that inverted angle.
So what the employees will do is sometimes, instead of driving on all the warehouse, they drive off the side, right? It creates a bump, sometimes very minimal. Sometimes they're just getting that last inch, inch and a half. But what we try to explain is if you're carrying a few thousand pounds of product and that were to fall, anybody in that area has put at risk, put the customer's product at risk and who's not to say a glass piece isn't gonna be off to the side that didn't get picked up. You know, potential further risk.
So those are the incidents, you know, that we see the most common of, that we're able to, you know, coach and correct that behavior.
And then also we see is a lot of, you know, individuals that are loading product, they're just kind of slamming the cases in there. We understand they're trying to cube out the trailer, trying to maximize the paths that go on there, but once again, creating potential risks for themselves, for the individual that's to unload that and for the customer's product again.
So those are the areas where we're seeing a lot of. We used to see in the beginning, employees kind of running over broken chip pallets, broken wood, you know. Now we're starting to see more videos of the initial rollover, but then the employee getting off and picking it up, right? So it's, the videos aren't always necessarily even coaching negative behaviors.
Also wanna make sure we're coaching those positive behaviors and thanking them. You know, and there's various ways we could, you know, tell them thank you. But you know, it's when the employees see that their actions have favorability, a thank you, a small little token, a pop, you know, we start to see more of 'em.
So those are really the ones that pop in my head when I see about behaviors and coaching opportunities.
Evan: Yeah, the carrot usually does a lot better than the stick. In most cases. People, people like to be told they're doing a good job. So it's pretty cool to see that you've actually been able to see behavior change over time, that people are, the culture is changing and people are doing the right thing.
I think a lot of people, they think about safety in terms of the impacts, people denting racks, two forklifts colliding, and yeah, of course everyone wants to see those things, address those things, get it outta the operation. That's a no-brainer, but really it kind of comes down to what you talked about driving over a dock plate incorrectly.
You could do that a hundred times and 99 times it's gonna be perfectly fine, but that hundredth time could end up with this massive incident and that's the behaviors that you really wanna focus on to proactively change the culture. And I think that's what you've done a really great job of, focusing more on that. It's not always the obvious things. It's sometimes the non-obvious things that you need to train your team to look for to then drive out of the organization. And then that positive reinforcement kind of stacks on top of that as the next level, the gold standard that we always talk about.
Karl: Exactly.
Evan: What are some of those other, I guess, common blind spots that you think of in a warehouse? I mean, warehouses are big. Your facility is a few hundred thousand square feet, right? There's product to the ceiling. There's people everywhere flying around, so you can't see everything. You can't be everywhere all the time.
So what are some of those blind spots that you think of, and then what are some of the things that you and your team do to try and get around those blind spots or get a little more visibility into those areas?
Karl: Especially in a warehouse like ours and the way it's set up, there's a lot of activity on the dock, right? That's where the product's coming in, the product's going out. That's where all the verifications are happening. That's where if there's something that is a little outside of normal process, that's a customer request. It's kind of being done right there on the dock.
So really the blind sides are when you get into those slow movers and kind of the back of the warehouse and, you know, those areas where 12 months' worth of product for some starts to go into our slower velocity locations for items. And that's really holistically just what we do is just try to be visible in all areas of the warehouse. You know?
We do our gemba walks every day, if not twice a day. The operations manager and I, and we really make sure that we go on a right path where we're, yes, maybe most of the time will be spent in the dock area, but also going back there and, you know, making sure nothing's out of place. You know, making sure nothing's tilting or leaning or possibility of falling.
And you know, once again, asking the operators the same thing, to just not only think about where you're at all the time. Even those areas you cross once a day and it's the same conversation to them because there's a lot of good conversations about the dock, but we gotta remember the dock is not the whole warehouse.
So it's really trying to be visible in all those areas and just keeping that in the forefront, that though nothing is going on there at the moment. Let's still walk past and make sure everything looks secure.
Evan: Yeah, it's like the dock is where the action happens. But again, like I was talking about, you could do something a hundred times and 99 times gonna be fine. So the back of the warehouse, 99 times out of a hundred is gonna be fine. But if you miss something that one time, that's what, that's when the risk really comes into play.
So looking at those kind of forgotten areas like where the cobwebs are in the back quarter, but you have to go there sometimes. If you go there and it's not perfectly set up or someone's not being mindful of their surroundings, that's when bad things can happen.
Karl: Exactly.
Evan: We've talked about safety a lot. I'm curious, how do you manage the other side of that coin, right? Which is making sure that orders are going out the door fast and in high quality. So how do you manage the productivity and quality of an operation while still keeping safety front and center? What's the secret sauce to having that golden triangle kind of firing on all cylinders?
Karl: Yeah. As we referred to earlier, right? It's using the resources that the company provides us to coach and train employees and showing them the math that goes behind it, right? And helping them understand what downtime, what gap times, how they lead to in that mathematical equation, and what their day would've looked like if they hadn't stopped.
Right. You know, we don't ever wanna say go faster in productivity 'cause that leads to safety incidents, right? We do a good amount of case picking here. Right. So it's really focusing on the processes, right? What is the grad factor for that specific item? Yes, you should be able to rip off 300 cases an hour with this item. Turn around this item over here, you're only gonna get 50 cases an hour.
Right? And it's that balancing of the day and showing the employees where those gaps happen, what their day could have looked like, and showing them how to get to the mathematical equation, right? We're a units per hour facility, right? So it's the units you pick in a 60 minute span. It's as simple as you could get.
We post all the goals. There's different goals for all the different functions. Replenishing has a different goal than loading the pallet. And loading the pallet has a different goal than picking a pallet. Right? So it's that coaching and training upfront, showing them what the foundation is, showing them what the mathematical equation behind it is, and then coaching those employees in those most help needed spots.
Right? That's where we've aligned with OneTrack. And we've been working on for the past few weeks, the gold standard site to really have OneTrack help us to what we need to see more of to be in that driver's seat, as I always say, to see what that employee's picking and to help coach them on, okay, let's try this, or, okay, let's try to grab it this way. Let's build the pallet this way.
Right? If you're inbounding, let's inbound one lane at a time. Let's inbound two lanes at a time. This product, you could stack three high. But here you are now having to down stack that third pallet 'cause you can't reach that third pallet to put the tag on and inbound it.
So it really starts with ensuring the operator understands their goals, how to get to their goals, what the goals look like, and then it always turns into the most powerful element of training is following them and understanding how they're interacting with the system, how they're interacting with the product, and how they're interacting with the RF unit.
And sometimes it's as small as when they scan the tag and sometimes it's as big as helping them understand how to load a truck and how to really load it correctly. So it always starts with the understanding and always finishes with hands first training.
Evan: Yeah. I always think of it as that, you know, that people-process-technology. You have to have people bought in, they understand what's going on, they're mindful of their surroundings. They are fully attuned to everything the warehouse asks them to do. It's the process. Are they doing things correctly? Are they following all the standard operating procedures all the time?
And then technology. How do you use technology to kind of enable those two things? I think a lot of people get it wrong where they say, "I need automation to go do this for me." But if you automate a bad process, it's just gonna be kind of a poor process on steroids. So you have to start with people, then process, then technology to enable that.
And I think something we always say, you can't solve problems you can't see. So getting visibility into these problems so that you can fix your processes, you can coach your people the right way and give them the data they need while understanding they might not always be data experts, but everyone can understand, you know, UPH to your point of you need to do this many units in a 60 minute period.
Like everyone can get on board with that. They just need to know what's all the factors that play into that behind it. And I think it's kind of that series of events of people, then process, then technology where some people get that kind of turned around and that's where, in my opinion, I've seen a lot of issues happen when it comes to setting up a warehouse and kind of pushing to that gold standard.
So I just mentioned robots and automation. It's something that I wanna shift gears here. We talk about this idea of the warehouse of the future. And I talked to some people and they're like, the warehouse of the future means fully autonomous, no people, robotics everywhere. Other people are on the opposite end of that spectrum.
So I'm curious, what does the warehouse of the future actually mean to you when you think about what a warehouse is gonna look like in the next 5, 10, 15 years?
Karl: You know, really thinking about it, I think it'll always be a combination of people and technology, and really filling in those gaps that we face daily, right? So, for example, I know OneTrack is working with us so that every pallet we load gets a picture taken. Those are the very first phase of the warehouse of the future, right at your fingertips.
If a customer asks for their bill of lading and the 30 pallets we loaded, one click of the button — they have all that information they need. Right? Instead of looking through cameras or stopping the employee every time they load a pallet to take a picture. Depending on what phone you have, that's the quality that the customer's gonna get. Depending what the operator had on first shift, their phone compared to the second shift one, you may get a variation of pictures.
For what I foresee: quicker, faster, accurate data for any gap that a customer may need to where we can almost show the customer the life of their case and send it through the whole line from start to finish. And those are what I see happening quickly.
Going onto that next step, I do see some more interaction with some more of our strenuous tasks: case picking, inbounding, slip sheets, kind of tackling those costly problems and those day-to-day problems. And that's what I'd like to see as the warehouse of the future — just those accurate, at-your-fingertips information and knowledge to help our customers make their decisions and to help their customers with their product.
Evan: I think it's a good answer. 'Cause again, I think a lot of people think about this — I don't wanna say fairytale vision, but like kind of pie in the sky vision of fully autonomous warehouse, because that just doesn't make sense for a lot of operations. And it's not financially viable for a lot of people and it doesn't really match customer specific requirements. And there's all kinds of factors that go into fully autonomous warehouses.
And to your point, I think the future is getting data in the hands of the people who need it in a non-data format, right? It's plain language stuff. It's like, here, here's what you need to make this decision. In very simple terms. You don't necessarily have to go ask for IT resources, ask for engineering resources. There's gonna be projects for that. But I think the future is like, how do we get the information people need to make faster decisions in their hands without needing them to be data experts and needing them to be engineers?
Because I think asking an ops manager to be fully versed in a lot of the technical aspects of IT and engineering, it's just — that's never gonna happen. And if you have to wait a week to get on a call with engineering and then another week to make a decision, things slow down and things break. Warehouses have to move fast.
I agree with you. I think that's really where the future is heading when it comes to warehousing, at least in that medium-term look.
Karl: Yeah. And I think that's speaking the next one to three years. Right. You know, I do think everything will keep advancing and there's some awesome projects in the works out there and autonomy is coming, but I think it'll be more piece by piece than, like you said, with one day we snap our fingers, every function is automated and no human intervention. I think it'll be step by step, function by function.
Evan: So what advice would you give to other general managers and site leaders who are maybe preparing for this next one to, let's call it 10 years of warehousing? What do they need to be thinking about? What do they need to be doing with their teams now to kind of set up for that?
Karl: I think it's like you said, right? You have these hard line processes written out. Fully understandable. Critique to the audience that's reading them, right. Making sure they all make sense and they all work. Like you said, bad inputs lead to bad outputs, right?
So really making sure that you have all that foundational work done and ready and understanding what you want the outcome to be. Right. We may have a way of doing things, but you know, the vendor or the company we're speaking to limits us to do this. I think you stand by your processes and the ones that help our company and our customers the most.
Right. And then I think just being prepared to test it out, understanding and seeing it live in action. Right? I always joke around with sports, played football at a very low level, right? Didn't make it to the big leagues. But you know, I always thought it was funny. You draw a play on the board and it looks like the most beautiful play, but then when you have people out there trying to stop it, which would be all the elements of a warehouse and all the variables that you run into, the play doesn't look as beautiful on the field.
So, you know, being prepared and having those environments ready to test out to see if it really fits for your business and your customer's business.
Evan: Yeah. What's the quote? Everyone has a plan until they get hit in the face. Yeah, so you can, you can have the best thing up on the whiteboard, but you take a bunch to the jaw and that's when, that's when you start seeing stars and things start falling apart. So you have to prepare for all those contingencies. 'Cause everything looks perfect when you put it on paper, but when you put it into a warehouse with people and machines crossing paths, different customer requirements and just all the various things that happen in a warehouse, you have to plan for those things and get ahead of those things proactively.
Karl: Exactly.
Evan: So I remember we were talking before and you talked about the case of the missing pallet. You know, someone is looking for product that's supposed to be here and it's not here. I think that happens in just about every warehouse on Earth. So I'm just curious, how often do you deal with that? What does that kind of cost you in time or money or just whatever that might look like. And then what happened then and how are you getting ahead of it now?
Karl: I wish I had the quote, it'd be a little better for the podcast, but basically what the individual was saying, you never get back time and it's hard to put a dollar value on time. Right. So really you could look at any lost time as to the 10th degree. Right. And that's where you really try to ensure that your time is spent on value added, because that's where the gain is, right?
So when we're sitting there looking for a pallet of lost product, that should have been a simple scan by the employee into the correct location, we're already at a loss. Right? And then when you go back into it, you're interviewing employees, you're driving up and down docks, you really continue to lose time.
So the story that I shared with you was just really that coming to light moment of understanding how much OneTrack can not only help us with safety but also help us with our own product and help us with more coaching moments.
So you start at the last physical scan that we have on record. Start your OneTrack recording from that moment, and then that's when the investigation begins, right? And it continues to kind of spiral down. If we lose products and we have to cut an order, we're impacting our customer's customers, impacting our KPIs, impacting our inventory accuracy.
Sometimes, most of the time we end up finding the product later, so then now we have a double adjustment bringing it back in and you know, customers have to reorder, cost more money to get it there. When I could have just went on that one pallet, it can continue. It's a spiral, right?
And we do physicals. We do quarterly counts and that's where you'll pick up on any product that wasn't in the location our system tells us. It's not supposed to be in this location, but that's where we really have to go down and retrain and re-coach those employees and really try to understand what were they trying to accomplish and how did it go in that wrong spot.
But to your point, this is something that everybody faces in the industry, right? We still have that human intervention and mistakes happen, but I think that's the most important piece is the coaching of that. The retraining and helping that employee understand and helping us understand what went wrong in that thought process to retrain them and to retrain the next employee, right?
Without the help of OneTrack and the resources that we have, the most unfortunate thing is sometimes we never get that training or that coaching to that employee level, and there are various times where the employee doesn't even realize they did something wrong, and I feel like that's the true loss of that specific incident.
No coaching or retraining, and the employee doesn't even realize they had made a mistake that they should be coached on. So that's where we really tried to use OneTrack, and that was a good selling point to the rest of the leadership team — about that timing and getting that time back, but also spinning it off to the employees of, "You know, this will help us help you."
Evan: Yeah. It's only a mistake if you don't learn from it. So to your point, it's like, if you don't, if no one knows they're making a mistake, they're gonna keep doing it because they either forget something or, I don't know, just they think that's the right way to do something. So people have to first know about it and then learn from it to get ahead of it in the future.
And otherwise, you're just gonna keep kind of running in circles doing the same thing, banging your head against a wall when you can't find that missing pallet. When you can get ahead of it, you get the information. When you do miss a pallet, you can quickly go search for it and see a picture of where that was scanned in, you know exactly where it is, and then you can tell that employee, "Hey, you know, you messed up here. It's okay. We get it. Things happen. But in the future you need to do X, Y, and Z to keep this from happening."
That's again, this is little steps to going from good to that gold standard.
So if you had a magic wand and you were all powerful here for a second, what would be the one thing you could change about the warehousing and logistics world? I'm sure there might be a long list, but if you could pick one thing that you could just wave the magic wand, what would it be?
Karl: I think I'm a little biased. You know, being in the great state of Illinois, the only thing that comes to my mind after getting through our ice storm last week and the possibility of a weather storm coming tomorrow — you can't control weather 'cause everything has a reaction, right? Cause and effect.
But you know, and I just can't help but think right now that magic wand would be to keep the weather, you know, on the weekends. So the employees and the truck drivers, or everyone's safe at home. It's a little farfetched, right? But change about the world of warehousing and logistics. I think it would just be, at this point, I know we're going there, but just all that information live at your fingertips. I just really truly think that, you know, and I know it's coming, so someone is working the magic wand at the moment, but it's really just as the world gets faster, continue to get data faster.
Evan: Well, you might get that data at your fingertips sooner than you think. So, you know, maybe, maybe that magic wand will follow through for you. And on behalf of all people in North Carolina, you can send the winter storms here. I will take all the snow. It's been a while since I've seen it, so I will take any snow Illinois wants to throw our way.
Karl: And you know how unpredictable it is. I've seen reports from one inch to 12 inches, right? So you know, it even makes planning a little harder, right? Are we planning for one inch? Are we planning for 12 inches of snow? Assume both have very different outcomes if we get 12 inches of snow.
Evan: Change the math a little bit.
Karl: Impacts the day a little more than one inch. Absolutely.
Evan: Well, hey Carl, I think we're about out of time here. I gotta let you get back to actually running your building. So I appreciate you hopping on and taking a few minutes and chatting with me today.
Karl: Awesome. Thank you for inviting me and thank you guys for everything we do at OneTrack.
Evan: Thanks for tuning into another episode of Warehouse Visionaries. Here are my top three takeaways from my conversation with Carl.
Number one, you have to focus on being consistent and getting buy-in from the workers who are actually doing the work on the floor. You have to celebrate milestones and give workers a voice on shaping safety policies and culture. Don't try and just make the perfect process on paper and expect everyone to fall in line if they don't feel like their voice is being heard.
Number two, it's not always the obvious things you need to train and coach on. You can drive over a dock plate a hundred times and 99 times, nothing happens. But if you do it unsafe, all it takes is one time for a serious incident to occur. You have to become a detective in the warehouse. Look for the little things and the behaviors that cause risks, even if it didn't cause an incident today.
And number three, the warehouse of the future is a combination of people and technology. It's not a hundred percent automation. It's about getting quicker, faster, accurate data for everything in your operation, right at your fingertips so you can follow up on any request that a customer has in real time.
As the world gets faster, you need data faster, and that starts with visibility into your people, your processes, and your product.
If you've listened this far, I know you're serious about making real improvements to your warehouse operation, so you can subscribe to the show on YouTube, follow OneTrack on LinkedIn, and subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss an episode. And always get the best resources from your peers in the industry so you can stay one step ahead.
So until next time, I'm Evan from OneTrack, and this is Warehouse Visionaries.
