Most Recent Articles

How does your labeling process work for your facility after expanding it to support your e-commerce business? Unlike the simpler processes of shipping out pallets and totes to a retail location or distribution partner which lives on the common 4x6 label, e-commerce shipments of individual bags or cartons being shipped to residential addresses can come with a very different level of complexity.

While the standard 4x6 stock label may still be the best option for many of your shipments, it’s worth a look at some of the other considerations to take into account to ensure that your labels are not the weak link in ensuring that your distribution center is not a source of lower customer satisfaction.

With the huge jump in facilities supporting Ecommerce from last year, the hiccups stemming from building the new capability in operations that were new to it are still ongoing. Individual vs. case shipping, single-item picking, and returns are some of the processes that have taken on a higher level of complexity and created difficult challenges for many facilities. Today we’ll spend a few minutes on one of the most visible, difficult and costly of those “new” processes – Returns.

We regularly cover many of the core processes that a warehouse or production line work to optimize every day, with a particular focus on how to measure and improve them. While “labeling” is a key part or outcome in many of these processes, it’s generally not referred to as its own “process”.

If you have always been a big fan of following futuristic trends, then twenty years ago you might have assumed that by this year peel and stick labels would be a thing of the past and your products and packages would be engraved by lasers. The reality is that as supply chains have gotten more sophisticated and Ecommerce continues on its decades-long growth trend, “labels” have not only NOT gone away, they are more prolific and ubiquitous than ever – and more important than ever.

Aside from a growth trajectory with no visible end, here are some of the labeling trends we think are important to be aware of today.

Labeling continues to be a crucial and strategic aspect of the supply chain. With a number of factors affecting the processes of labeling, it is imperative to determine what changes are driving the labeling trends today.

Based on a recent Enterprise Labeling Trends Survey, with data accumulated from over 500 supply chain professionals, there are five trends in enterprise labeling to watch for in 2015.