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Warehouses are busy environments and seem only to be getting busier. With the growth of eCommerce and shrinking lead times, there’s more pressure than ever to move products quickly, maintain transparency in the supply chain, and elevate the customer experience.

An efficient warehouse is a profitable warehouse, but it can be tricky to gauge how efficient your workplace pipeline is. You need to track traffic in and out, orders, and everything in between. You might already have a system in place to review your warehouse effectiveness, but an easy way to improve your performance is to review the little details.

For many organizations, handling reverse logistics can be challenging. If you think about it, most supply chains are created to get products from point A to point B, not bring them back in the other direction.

Online ordering has made shopping so simple that customers expect an equally hassle-free returns process. While product returns might be one of the costs of doing business, how you handle the 5 Rs of reverse logistics can impact how much this process will affect your company’s overall results.

For several months each year, warehouses face a surge of activity due to skyrocketing product demand. This peak season begins as early as October as people begin preparing for the upcoming holiday season and ends sometime in January as warehouses are still dealing with high return volumes.

Peak season is officially here. And, if your warehouse can manage its inflows and outflows efficiently during the busiest time of year, it should be smooth sailing during those other months. Knowing how to best run your operations when the stakes are highest might be challenging. But it will also improve your overall business results.

If your business sells, handles, or stores products, its success depends largely on the quality of its inventory management system. It’s not a sexy topic. But it sure is important. Unfortunately, when it comes time to spend capital on innovations that will boost business results, automated inventory management systems are often overlooked.

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.

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.

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.