Every missed pallet has a story, and none of those stories end with “It wasn’t a big deal.”
Over, Short, and Damaged claims often appear in reports as isolated incidents. A shortage here. An extra pallet there. A damaged load noted after delivery. Individually, they look like operational noise. Collectively, they reveal something far more important: where visibility stopped.
In most OS&D cases, the problem is not the mistake itself. It’s the moment where certainty ended and assumptions took over. Somewhere between staging, loading, and departure, the system lost sight of what actually happened. From that point on, everything becomes interpretation.
Assumptions are expensive
Across the industry, OS&D related costs quietly consume an estimated five to ten percent of logistics budgets each year. The financial impact extends well beyond claim payouts. Administrative hours are spent gathering evidence. Drivers are delayed. Detention charges accumulate. Customer service teams manage escalations. Most damaging of all, trust is slowly eroded.
When a 3PL cannot prove what happened, conversations shift. Instead of managing performance, teams negotiate responsibility. Instead of resolving issues quickly, they compromise. Over time, this weakens commercial relationships and puts pressure on margins.
This is why many operations are rethinking how they define risk.
Risk is the absence of evidence
Risk is no longer just the error or the damage. It is the absence of evidence.
Traditional systems record what should have happened. Scans, signatures, and paperwork confirm intent, not outcome. When something goes wrong, teams are left piecing together fragments of information to reconstruct a version of events that may never be fully provable.
When the system can observe what happened
Computer vision changes that equation.
With real time visual verification, the story of each pallet is written automatically. Pallets are seen as they move. Loading events are confirmed as they occur. Each movement is time stamped and linked to a specific dock, truck, and order. There is no need to debate what happened, because the system observed it.
A continuous chain of evidence with forklift vision
Forklift vision strengthens this chain of evidence even further. Forklifts define how pallets move through the final stages of outbound flow. When forklift movement is visible, there are no gaps between staging and loading. The record is continuous, not episodic.
This continuity is what turns OS&D from a recurring cost into a manageable exception.
Instead of searching for answers, teams already have them. Instead of reviewing footage after the fact, supervisors can confirm events in real time. Disputes are resolved faster, often before they escalate. In many cases, claims are prevented entirely because issues are caught before the truck leaves the dock.
From defensive to confident operations
What changes most dramatically is posture.
Warehouses move from defensive to confident. Conversations with customers are based on facts, not explanations. Compliance becomes a byproduct of visibility rather than an administrative burden. Evidence exists by default. Risk does not disappear. But it becomes visible.
This is where Zimark changes the dynamic. With our Smart Pallet Tracking solutions capturing load events as they happen, teams don’t have to chase screenshots, replay footage, or rely on memory. They have instant proof of load — a clear, time stamped record tied to the dock, the truck, and the shipment — ready the moment a question is asked.
And in logistics, visibility accounts for most of control.
