Handled It: The Supply Chain Podcast

Every retailer knows the returns wave is coming. Almost nobody is ready when it hits the dock in January. In this episode of Handled It, Joe Perkins and Brent Hillabrand sit down with Aaron Lamb of Toyota Automated Logistics and Chris Youngs of Carolina Handling to dig into the $850 billion returns problem, and why the fix starts long before anything ships.

The conversation gets practical fast: how product descriptions, fit tools and better tagging stop returns before they're ever ordered, what a real returns lane looks like versus pallets piling up in the corner, and why a wrong item shipped is the hardest return of all to bring back in. From there it's a look at how vision systems and AI are catching picking mistakes before they leave the building, how to tell a designed returns process from an improvised one, and what it costs when executives only watch what goes out the door. One retailer built a 200,000-square-foot building just to hold returns, and it gets used about three months a year.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why returns are a predictable problem most operations still treat as a surprise

• How to push the problem upstream into descriptions, tagging and order accuracy

• What a designed returns lane looks like versus the pile in the corner

• Why a wrong item shipped is the hardest return to bring back in

• How vision systems and AI catch picking errors before they ship

• How to tell if your returns process is designed or improvised

• Why executives need to see the whole building, not just the outbound side

Returns don't start at the dock. They start with every decision made before the order ships. Learn how to shrink the wave before it forms, so January stops being a surprise.

Everybody wants a clean safety scorecard. Almost nobody asks whether the numbers are telling the truth. In this episode of Handled It, Joe Perkins and Brent Hillabrand sit down with Mark Hernandez, "Safety Mark," Carolina Handling's safety lead — to draw the line between a company that has a safety program and one that has a safety culture. The difference, as Mark puts it, is what happens on the floor when nobody is watching.

The conversation gets specific fast: why "zero near misses" almost always means someone is staying quiet, how the near-miss iceberg hides the real risk beneath the incidents you actually record, and why psychological safety is what gets a hazard raised instead of buried. From there it's a practical tour of what strong culture looks like day to day — observing instead of policing, treating associates as the experts, separating urgency from shortcuts when the shift is already behind, acting on ideas from the field, and the small leadership habits (floor presence, housekeeping, a daily check-in text) that add up. And Mark makes the case nobody wants to hear: the moment you hand safety to one person with a clipboard, you've started building a wall of silence.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why a safety program lives on paper and a safety culture lives in behavior when no one's around

• Why "zero near misses" is a warning sign, not a win

• How the near-miss iceberg hides your real risk — and how to get it reported

• Why observing beats policing, and how curiosity gets the truth out of the floor

• How to separate urgency from shortcuts when you're short-staffed and behind

• The leadership habits that quietly build (or break) a safety culture

• Why you can't outsource safety to one person with a clipboard

Your safety numbers aren't the story. What your people won't tell you is. Learn how to build a culture where hazards get raised instead of hidden — so everyone goes home better than they showed up.

Not every productivity gain needs a capital request. In this episode of Handled It, Joe Perkins and Brent Hillabrand sit down with Dan Grupp and Ashley Watkins to talk about the low-hanging fruit,  the low-cost, low-drama changes that can move output right away, before anyone signs off on another hire, a new system, or a robot. If your instinct when the numbers slip is to add people or add technology, this conversation makes the case that you should walk your floor first.

The group gets practical fast: shortening default Outlook and Teams meetings, cutting unnecessary standups, reducing wasted walking, relocating supplies, and re-slotting SKUs that clearly aren't where they belong. A dusty box sitting in a prime pick zone might look insignificant, but it can be a signal that your slotting strategy hasn't been questioned in years. From there, the conversation gets into a bigger problem: leaders often confuse "busy" with productive, become blind to waste that's hiding in plain sight, and fail to reanalyze processes that operators already know are broken. Dan and Ashley explain why the people closest to the work often have the best ideas, why incentive structures can keep them from speaking up, and how simple disciplines like Gemba walks and repeatedly asking "why" can uncover improvements without spending a dollar on automation.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why your cheapest productivity gains may already be hiding on the warehouse floor

• How meetings, standups, walking paths, and supply placement quietly eat into output

• Why dust on a box can tell you your slotting strategy needs another look

• How leaders become "waste blind" and start confusing activity with productivity

• Why operators often see the problem first — and what keeps them from speaking up

• How morale, absenteeism, turnover, lighting, and temperature affect measurable performance

• Why Gemba walks and root-cause thinking should come before expensive automation

Before you buy another machine or post another job opening, look at the work that's already happening. The biggest productivity gains may come from removing the friction, wasted motion, and outdated habits your team has learned to work around every day.

Omnichannel fulfillment is becoming one of the biggest challenges in modern retail, but what happens when the customer promise gets ahead of the supply chain? In this episode, Joe Perkins, Brent Hillabrand, and guests Alex Haines and Aaron Lambe, from Toyota Automated Logistics, break down how retailers can balance store inventory, distribution centers, fulfillment costs, and customer expectations without creating unnecessary complexity. You’ll learn why real-time inventory visibility, flexible automation, and smarter fulfillment strategies are critical to keeping same-day, curbside, and e-commerce promises.

The conversation explores how retailers are turning stores into fulfillment nodes, the hidden costs of store-level picking, the role of AI and supply chain orchestration, and why order profiles should influence automation and distribution center decisions. Alex and Aaron also share practical insights on inventory allocation, replenishment, warehouse design, data quality, and when retailers should optimize what they already have instead of investing in new facilities or technology.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Understand how omnichannel fulfillment impacts inventory, stores, distribution centers, and the customer experience

• Learn why disconnected systems and inaccurate inventory data can undermine fulfillment promises

• Explore the tradeoffs between store fulfillment, distribution center fulfillment, and localized fulfillment nodes

• See how automation, AI, and supply chain orchestration can improve inventory visibility and fulfillment efficiency

• Learn why your order profile should guide warehouse design, automation, and capital investment decisions

Don’t risk making customer promises your supply chain can’t keep. Learn how to build a more flexible, efficient omnichannel fulfillment strategy that works in the real world.

Everybody is talking about the labor shortage. Almost nobody is asking the better question. In this episode of Handled It, Joe Perkins and Brent Hillabrand sit down with Eddie Lowry, Automation Systems Engineer at Carolina Handling, and Alex Haines, Head of Accounts at Toyota Automated Logistics, to make the case that most operations don't have a labor problem at all — they have a tooling problem. If your instinct when the numbers slip is to post another job ad, this conversation will challenge where that next dollar should actually go.

The group gets specific fast: why so many warehouse managers still read "moving" as "productive," why an empty forklift raises eyebrows but an empty-handed picker doesn't, and how operators learn to look busy just to get by. From there it's a practical tour of what augmentation actually looks like on a floor — goods-to-person, AMRs, conveyor, vertical lift modules, shuttles — and an honest accounting of why these projects fail. Spoiler: it's almost never the equipment. Eddie and Alex get into over-scoping and under-scoping, the assumptions buried in every proposal, the machine rate that doesn't survive contact with a real human being, and the financing and phasing options most operators don't know exist.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why "we can't find people" is often a tooling problem wearing a labor-shortage costume
• Why managers reward movement instead of output, and what that costs you
• How to decide whether the next dollar goes to a new hire or a new tool
• What actually kills automation projects, and why the box is rarely the culprit
• Why you should never automate a process you haven't mapped
• How scaling in, financing, and phased rollouts lower the barrier to entry
• Why the biggest return may be the people who stop quitting

Your team isn't slow. Your technology is. Learn how to take the walking, the searching, and the repetition out of the job so the people you already have can do work worth a human's time.

Complexity doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates. One extra approval. One redundant system. One workaround that quietly becomes standard practice. Before long, the operation is slower, costlier, and more frustrating despite having more tools and processes than ever.

In this POV episode of Handled It, Joe Perkins and Brent Hillabrand are joined by Ashley Watkins and Woody Paschal of Carolina Handling to unpack complexity as a hidden cost that rarely appears on a P&L but affects every line of it.

Woody shares real-world examples from the field, including a segmented manufacturing operation where “pockets of simplicity” quietly added up to system-wide complexity, and a customer who saved more than $25,000 a year simply by adding a pickup to an already scheduled return trip.

The group explores how complexity creeps in without anyone consciously choosing it, how a “process Frankenstein” is built one reasonable decision at a time, why 30% of warehouse labor is spent on non-value-adding work, and why the solution is almost always subtraction, not addition.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why complexity is something you accumulate, not choose, and why it rarely fixes itself

• How “pockets of simplicity” create system-wide complexity

• Why adding process is easy, but removing it is hard

• What 30% non-value-adding labor really costs

• Why subtraction beats addition in process improvement

• When technology simplifies operations and when it adds complexity

• How Carolina Handling uses data to reveal the real problem

The most expensive thing in your operation is the one that never shows up in a budget line. Learn how to find it and take it back.

Maintenance isn't a line item to cut when the month gets tight. It's the strategy that quietly decides your uptime, your costs, and your culture. In this episode of Handled It, Joe Perkins and Brent Hillabrand are joined by David Horak and Lauren Murphy to unpack the reactive maintenance trap: why operational disasters rarely start with a catastrophic failure, but with one PM that got pushed, and then another.

From PM compliance and telematics to total cost of ownership and the partnership model behind Carolina Handling's own 10,000-asset fleet, the group breaks down why the cheapest-looking maintenance decision this month is often the most expensive one next quarter. They get into the "stability vs. chaos" gap between a scheduled visit and an emergency call, how deferred maintenance erodes both the equipment and the people running it, and why a documented 3–5x ROI on preventive maintenance still loses, because the real barrier is cultural, not financial.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why reactive maintenance disasters start with one pushed PM

• How deferring maintenance "saves" money now and compounds into bigger spend later

• Why PM compliance is a leading indicator of operational health

• How telematics turns firefighting into fireproofing

• Why maintenance is a culture, retention, and safety issue, not just a mechanical one

• Why total cost of ownership, not purchase price, should be the first number on the table

The daily huddle and the visual management board are two of the most powerful, and most consistently wasted, tools on any operations floor. In this episode of Handle It, Joe Perkins, Brent Hillabrand, Ryan Tiller, and Ashley Watkins break down what separates a 10-minute meeting that transforms a shift from a mandatory gathering everyone dreads and nobody acts on.

From the football scoreboard analogy to why a board loses all its power the moment the data is wrong, the group gets specific on what great actually looks like: short, consistent huddles, associate ownership that drives behavior instead of just tracking it, and the counterintuitive truth that finding more problems means the system is working. Run with discipline, a huddle and a whiteboard become the operating system your floor actually runs on.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why most shift meetings are expensive, habitual, and pointless

• What a great huddle looks like: standing, under 15 minutes, ownership assigned

• Why a board loses all its integrity the moment the data is wrong

• How to run a huddle when you walk into a five-alarm fire

• Why finding more problems means the system is working

• How to hand the board to associates so it drives behavior, not just tracking

• Why "problems are good" and what hiding them really signals

Not all KPIs tell the truth. In this episode of Handled It, Joe Perkins, Brent Hillabrand, and Justin sit down with Adam Flood, Executive Director of Supply Chain at Wellstar Health, to break down the metrics that feel right but lead operations in the wrong direction. From cost-per-pick and fleet utilization to fill rates and incentive pay structures, this conversation exposes how chasing the wrong numbers creates misalignment, gaming, and downstream damage to the customers you're trying to serve.

Adam brings real-world examples from healthcare supply chain — including how switching from pallets to carts saved frontline staff 90 minutes a day — and introduces the concept of the "feel rate": not just whether you filled the order, but whether the customer actually felt it. The group also digs into Goodhart's Law, leading vs. lagging indicators, how to build empowered teams that drive their own metrics, and why simplifying your dashboard may be the most powerful operational move you make.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why cost-per-pick, fill rate, and fleet utilization can mislead more than they reveal

• How lagging indicators create reactive, firefighting cultures

• What the "feel rate" is and why it matters more than fill rate

• How to stop putting ceilings on your team by over-prescribing KPIs

• Why Goodhart's Law says when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure

• How to tailor dashboards for different levels of your organization

Your best-looking metric may be your biggest blind spot. Learn how to shift from measuring what's easy to measuring what's true — so your operation performs where it actually counts.

Operational failures don't come out of nowhere. In this episode of Handled It, Joe Perkins and Brent Hillabrand sit down with Meredith Steinmeyer, Director of Fleet Services and Energy at Floor & Decor, to break down the three weak points quietly eroding performance in operations everywhere: handoffs, visibility gaps, and single points of failure. Meredith brings real-world perspective from scaling Floor & Decor from 149 to 270+ stores, managing over 3,000 material handling assets, and navigating everything from COVID disruptions to hydrogen infrastructure risks.

This conversation challenges the common assumption that operational breakdowns are unpredictable. The signals are almost always there. The problem is that leaders aren't in the field, the silos are too high, and by the time leadership feels the pain, the customer already has.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why handoffs don't break operations immediately — they quietly erode performance until the customer feels it

• How visibility gaps shift operations from controlled to reactive

• What single points of failure look like in people, systems, and equipment

• Why you can't justify preventing downtime if you can't quantify it

• How Floor & Decor uses pink reach trucks, monthly strategy cadences, and cross-functional pilots to stay ahead of failure

Your operation isn't broken — but it might be signaling. Learn how to build the visibility, accountability, and team connection that keeps failure from becoming a surprise.