Damaged shipments: the dispute is lost at the moment of receipt

Why is the dispute lost right at receipt?

Because the evidence has to exist before anyone starts talking about damage. For international road transport, this is set out directly in the CMR Convention (opens in a new window): visible damage must be reported to the carrier at the latest when the shipment is received, and damage that is not apparent on receipt must be notified in writing within seven days of delivery, with Sundays and public holidays not counted in that period.

If no reservations are made, the consignee is presumed to have received the shipment in the condition described in the consignment note. In practice this is the harshest sentence in the whole convention: the burden of proof is reversed, and a company that unpacked the goods only two weeks later is proving something that is legally considered disproved.

For domestic transport, the contract and the Czech Civil Code apply, so the specific deadlines vary. The logic of evidence is the same, though, and neither a court nor an insurer changes it: what counts is the condition documented at handover, not what two people agree on a month later.

What actually counts as usable evidence?

A record that makes clear what it relates to and when it was made. A photo of a damaged pallet on a warehouse worker’s phone is better than nothing, but on its own it shows neither that it was taken at the moment of receipt nor which shipment it belongs to. Usable evidence has five parts:

• A time of capture that does not depend on when someone remembered to write it down.
• The condition of the packaging, captured so that it can be assessed, not a single detail picked out by the operator.
• Dimensions and weight, because disputes are often also about what actually arrived.
• Matching to the order or consignment note, otherwise the record relates to nothing.
• The same procedure for every shipment, so that the other party cannot object that only suspicious ones get photographed.

That last item is also the reason manual photographing fails. Measuring, weighing and photographing mean three extra tasks at the busiest moment of the day, so they get skipped when things get hectic. It is mainly the urgent shipments that get rushed, and those are exactly the ones that end up in a dispute.

What does it look like when the record creates itself?

The shipment passes through a scanning gate in a single pass. As it does, the system takes photographs, measures the dimensions and weight and matches the measured values to the order; the operator only confirms the result. This is exactly what eSCAN does, and the difference from manual practice is not that the record is better, but that it is created for every shipment and nobody has to think about it.

From a claims perspective, this is a shift from proving to presenting. The condition on receipt is documented by a record, so it is judged by the image, not by who remembers what. Shipments that need individual handling then move on to claims management, where the documents for a single shipment come together in one place.

Do you actually check the carrier’s invoice?

This is the other half of the subject, and companies usually leave it alone. Carriers charge by weight and dimensions, and for bulky shipments by the calculated volumetric weight, so if you do not measure your shipments yourself, you are accepting someone else’s figure with no way of checking it. This is not about suspecting dishonesty: a difference can arise simply because a pallet is wrapped further or a dimension is stated before packing.

Once you have your own measured values for every shipment, the invoice can be checked against them and, above all, the values can be passed on into your own billing. That turns the gate into a measuring instrument for operations, not just a camera for claims.

When does the scale have to be officially verified?

When you bill someone on the basis of it. The Czech Metrology Act (opens in a new window) classes measuring instruments used in contractual relationships and for determining prices as designated measuring instruments, and these may only be used for that purpose with valid verification. For your own checks and as supporting evidence for a claim this condition does not apply; for invoicing a customer it does.

It is a distinction worth clarifying before you choose the hardware, because it determines what equipment belongs in the gate. The answer to the question “do we want to invoice on this basis?” changes the brief more than any camera specification.

Where do you start?

By finding out how much disputes over shipments cost you each year and how many of them were lost because there was nothing to present. That figure is often the only one in the company that nobody tracks, even though accounting knows it. Only on that basis can you judge whether automatic recording at goods receipt pays off, or whether consistent photographing is enough. Goods receipt as a whole is then covered by digitalisation and tracking, where eSCAN sits alongside warehouse systems; how to choose between them is discussed in the article on off-the-shelf and custom warehouse systems.