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UPDATE: On Monday, March 29th, 2021, the Ever Given was freed and continued its journey northward, allowing for the passage of over 360 ships that had impacted about 15% of the entire world's container capacity. Bon Voyage!

Last week was the beginning of one of those rare weeks when you could tune into your daily news broadcast and hear your usual news readers interviewing supply chain analysts, shipping company representatives and logistics experts almost every day – a group of professional profiles that you almost never see on the national news!

We've been hearing from many of you over the last year about the increased need to become better at Ecommerce Fulfillment and with good cause. Perhaps more significant than the huge jump in Ecommerce sales in 2020 was the huge numbers of businesses that were caught flat-footed having to jump in and learn it from the bottom up for the first time.

One of the most common questions we hear in our industry - and discuss among our own teams – is “how far will automation go and WHEN?” As a manufacturer working to improve productivity for our customers, it is a question that has implications for every part of our business – not just in planning the products we want to develop and market, but those we will need to use in our production process.

Among the many things that are coming into focus as an unforeseen challenge to every business that had to suddenly ramp up their Ecommerce efforts last year is “packaging”. We haven’t covered it in detail yet, but it did create some serious issues in many DCs last year, both for outbound shipments and the inbound returns. While it might seem like an afterthought in the big picture of running a warehouse, it can be a surprisingly big problem that impacts productivity, customer satisfaction and even your space management.

How well did you feel your team handled the “pandemic pandemonium” in 2020? More than any other year we can remember, there was a yawning gap between the “winners and losers” across different industries, bases on a standard measure of revenue. But among the biggest “winners” on the demand side were many messy backend operations that were not prepared for the 2020 surge and struggled to keep up with the pace of shipments, returns and more.

Last year retailers everywhere in every niche, B2B and B2C, had to either learn how to do Ecommerce and In-Store Fulfillment for the first time or learn to do it much better on a bigger scale than ever before. What businesses did to engage with customers on the front end – evolving their offerings into a multichannel or omnichannel presence – was not always matched by the evolution required in the back end for fulfillment.

In 2020, more businesses discovered the benefit of “cutting the cord” with their electric outlets and putting their devices and workstations on carts fitted with powerful batteries. Mobile Power gave them the benefit of bringing their devices to their work, rather than wasting footsteps and other movement.

Among many of the challenges that 2020 forced so many businesses to solve was how to not just create a direct-to-customer fulfillment operation but to optimize it and standardize the processes enough to make it seem like less of the scramble that it was when all of this started almost a year ago. One specific process that was a common challenge for many businesses in 2020 was the Picking Process.

With the disruptions in supply chains all over the world making headlines in mainstream news channels, it’s a good time to revisit some basics on Supply Chain Planning (SPC) given that we now see a lot of businesses being forced to devote a lot more attention to this critical skill area than they may have before – because they did not have to.

As we have learned from managing the Ecommerce boom in 2020, the adrenalin of ramping up adequately to get hundreds – or thousands – of shipments out every day also has a “hangover” feeling that comes from the Returns process.