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While no one needs to be reminded how much has been changing across our industry in 2020, it’s useful to keep looking into HOW things are evolving and learning about what everyone is doing differently as either a reaction to events, or to get ahead of them more pro-actively.

At Newcastle Systems, the large variety of industries over which we receive orders gives us an interesting vantage point from which we can see how things have evolved quite a bit this year. Today we thought it would be useful to share some of what we have been seeing and what we might expect because of it going into 2021. To be brief – you’ve been incredibly innovative and creative this year.

* This article was an original contribution from our own Kevin Ledversis seen in Zebra Technologies "Your Edge" Blog on June 16, 2020.

Did you know you are spending up to twice as much on labor on your receiving dock as you should be? Or that the error rates on your receiving labels could be 10 times what they should be? More importantly, did you know that many of your workers are taking far more footsteps in a day than they need to due to excessive trips to the printer? These are problems that many retailers and 3PLs don’t realize that they have.

The good news is that these are problems easily solved with transportable printers – or, should I say, a stationary desktop or full-size industrial label printer that can be made mobile.

With heightened competition from the global economy, a dwindling workforce as a result of the labor shortage and increasing demands from customers—it’s never been more important for manufacturing facilities to focus on efficiency. Of course, many operations managers turn to lean techniques in an effort to streamline and increase production, but how can facilities take things a step further? 

There’s no doubt—manufacturing is a tough industry to work in. With tight turnaround times, increasing shipping demands and the need for immaculate quality, it’s a challenging space for a business to grow and thrive. To further complicate things—administrators are finding it difficult to attract and retain talent.

I often see areas of inventory which have no visibility in a system due to poor processes. For example, inbound goods sitting in trucks is very common.  When a formal receiving schedule does not exist, it is easy to get variances in arrival times. Consider these scenarios when inventory can become invisible:

There has been much written about finding and retaining happy warehouse workers. These issues are not going away as eCommerce is expected to grow.  But, who is going to do the work? It has never been more important to have the right equipment which includes an advanced warehouse cart with portable power.

If you take a look at how much business ecommerce websites like Amazon are doing every day online, it’s a no-brainer that this is where the customer shopping experience is heading. We are already there. With the waning need to go into a physical store to buy something and the ability that the internet gives us to order anything that we could possibly need from the comfort of our own couch.