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How has your business responded to the rapid changes in the distribution and logistics industry this year? Chances are that the rapid evolution of your processes and how you supported them are not just a band-aid for making it through to 2021, but the blueprint for your current and future facilities well beyond this crisis and into the future.

It’s hard to imagine during the heyday of lead acid batteries that anyone would have thought something called “Battery Day” could be seen as a futuristic, sleek, design-savvy symbol of innovation. But in case you missed it, yesterday September 22^nd was the annual Shareholder meeting for Tesla, an event they have branded as “Battery Day”, and is used as a showcase for new innovations, ideas and plans coming out of Tesla.

If you are like thousands of other businesses around the world this year, you probably can check off at least one of the boxes below:

• We had to figure out how to do E-Commerce for the first time.
• We previously dabbled with E-Commerce, but suddenly had to get good at it.
• We’ve been doing E-Commerce for a while, but this year broke all our records.
• Our Returns Process is messy, expensive and hard to manage to customer expectations.

If you’ve checked off either of the first two boxes, you probably needed to check off the last box too.

Back in March when it became clear that we would be in for a very unpredictable year ahead, we were quick to point out that anyone who was not already good at E-Commerce would now need to be or disproportionately suffer from the slowdown in activity. Four months into the crisis, that seems more true than even we had considered.

Since 2020 has us rethinking EVERYTHING we were doing before, we wanted to make a quick share for you to start the week with a visual look at some basic Warehouse Design fundamentals. The events of the last few months have everyone wondering what the warehouse of the future will look like. But while doing updates to your CURRENT space to react to the new normal, how closely have you been adhering to the basics already?

We thought this infographic was a good representation of some of those basic pillars of good warehouse design. Let's start with the basics we use for planning. The one thing we'll highlight here is how often we hear that space management is the BIGGEST issue our client's are having. If you are exceeding the guidance below and using over 30% of your square footage for storage, it means you might be feeling crowded. Better rack utilization and building up may improve your sense of space!

A few weeks ago in Part I, we looked at the bigger picture of Dock Design – the facility itself and the advantages and disadvantages of the different possible configurations for your docks and their bays (See the full article here). This week we’ll walk through some of the key elements in outfitting your dock that ensure optimal productivity for your facility and your shipping partners.

By now we are all aware we are dealing with an unprecedented global crisis that is going to impact every business and customer we know. But the impact will vary by the industry and type of customer being served. While we are not in the business of playing the role of economic pundits peering into reams of data and making predictions, it is safe to say that a boost in E-commerce operations among across many industries is already happening as retailers shut stores.

Have you spent any time observing the activity on your dock recently? How do you feel about the way it works and the share of cost it takes in your operations? Are you tracking the cost? Well, given that nearly every operations facility is a “cost center” on your company’s P&L, you should be looking at your cost structure for each of our main “Process Areas” like Receiving, Picking, Packing, Shipping, etc. While there are a lot of factors that go into generating the cost model for each of your processes, two areas in particular - Receiving and Shipping - are particularly dependent on the design of your dock and the equipment deployed to support it.

Unless your facility is consistently recognized as a bleeding edge innovator and always staying two steps ahead of the rest of your industry, you’re probably like the rest of us and are hungry to know more about how your facility performs or compares to your competitors or others in your industry.

Photo by Franck V. on Unsplash

“Industry 4.0” is a term now in common use generally to describe the “fourth industrial revolution”, a term that it is used interchangeably with. But what does it mean, on a high level and specifically for what impact it might have on your business?

To get us all on the same page, let’s first go back to “Industry 1.0” and be clear about the other distinct eras of industrial revolution: