On June 24, 2020, Labelmaster Vice President–Software & Customer Success Mario Sagastume and ProShip Senior Sales Engineer Clint Boaz presented “Living Dangerously: Demystifying Hazmat Shipping.”

Watch the complete recorded webinar here.

When you’re a shipper who is new to Dangerous Goods, where do you start?

That’s a question Mario Sagastume deals with all the time—and it’s also a regular issue for the folks at ProShip, a global provider of automated multi-carrier shipping software. We recently spoke with ProShip Senior Sales Engineer Clint Boaz and Strategic Marketing Manager Taylor Pawelka about how that question led to the idea for this essential, upcoming webinar.

Here’s what they had to say.

“We’re all struggling a little bit.”

Mario’s webinar kicks off a two-day, four-session event that promises to have broad appeal for parcel shippers across a variety of industries. Other sessions will focus on new e-commerce strategies for third-party logistics (3PL) companies, achieving more consistent and cost-effective direct-to-consumer delivery, and how top e-commerce retailers are reaching new levels of distribution efficiency.

Pawelka says the inspiration for the virtual event came from the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. “Lots of trade shows were cancelled or postponed,” she says. “We included a wide variety of topics, because we’re all struggling a little bit.”

“Your issues depend on your industry,” adds Boaz. “Retailers have been impacted differently than manufacturers or healthcare companies. Some still rely on store traffic for a majority of their revenue, and some are doing better with alternative sourcing and distribution. We wanted to give them access to subject matter experts who can help.”

One issue shippers in many industries face is how to handle hazmat. That’s where Mario’s webinar comes in.

“You have to do a lot of that work upstream.”

Labelmaster and ProShip are partners—ProShip’s shipping software shipping software and the Labelmaster DGIS system can be integrated to give shippers a single window for all internal partners, with instant, seamless access to Dangerous Goods shipment validation and documentation.

“I thought the benefit of the integrated systems was straightforward, and I could just explain it,” says Boaz. “But I discovered many people don’t really grasp the overall idea of what it takes to bring a hazmat item online into inventory, plus all the steps to getting it out the door. They thought there was a sort of Google that would magically tell them everything they needed to know about a material, without understanding that they have to do a lot of that work upstream.

“You can’t automate everything, and you can’t eliminate the human element.”

Pawelka adds, “There’s just a lot of confusion about the holistic process of hazmat shipping.”

“We wanted to give them the overall picture.”

To help shippers understand that holistic process, Boaz came up with the idea of “taking the audience on an end-to-end journey from the moment they decide to bring Dangerous Goods into inventory—procurement, data classification, training, all the way until the carrier picks it up. It would also include proper emergency response and reverse logistics.”

“We wanted to give them the overall picture as opposed to looking at one aspect at a time.”

That’s the thinking behind Mario’s session, which includes a comprehensive flow chart-style diagram designed to make the entire process more understandable. Pawelka says, “The better we explain things, the better customers are able to participate in the conversation.”

“When we’ve approached this from an educational perspective, we’ve gotten a really positive reaction,” says Boaz. “We approach it from the very beginning and look at everything in the process, so people understand why it can be so difficult.”

Mario’s webinar is part of that same effort. Boaz explains, “We hope to attract people who want to improve their fluency on the subject of hazmat shipping—to get people away from focusing on siloed processes and thinking about how they can apply that broader knowledge to new products, new systems, new processes and new resources.”

Sign up now for “Living Dangerously: Demystifying Hazmat Shipping” and the entire “ProS Who Know” virtual event—June 24 & 25!

Make sure your shipments are safe and in complete compliance with a full line of solutions from Labelmaster—a full-service provider of goods and services for hazardous materials and Dangerous Goods professionals, shippers, transport operators and EH&S providers.