“We are all ecommerce businesses now.” Well, maybe not all of us, but most businesses are now – to some extent – learning how to accommodate the demands of e-commerce: eBay and Amazon might have led the way but the pandemic drove every possible business in the direction of ecommerce and many are finding that they can’t, or don’t want to, reverse the process.
In a nutshell, e-commerce fulfilment is the process of receiving an order over the internet and delivering it to your customer efficiently. The various stages of this process all up to … Read More
When we talk about optimising pick and pack, we’re really looking at overcoming challenges to efficient pick and pack processes. Those challenges are:
These are two slightly different problems. Inaccurate inventory leads to confusion about what is available, whilst inadequate inventory is a failure to manage stocks into the warehouse space to allow for order fulfilment. The first is usually a problem of data entry, where stock records haven’t been updated or entered correctly, the second is a management failure which can be the result of poor data but can also be part of … Read More
Picking and pack is one of the simplest warehousing processes to understand – it’s the action of taking a customer’s orders from storage and placing them into a shipping box. The shipping box has obviated the need to pick orders and then process them in a variety of ways (box, envelope, pallet etc). Instead, many smaller businesses simply pick and pack in a single process, padding out larger shipping boxes with dunnage to ensure the goods won’t rattle around. Larger businesses may have a dedicated area of their warehouse space that they use to do ‘specialist pack’ which is where … Read More
What are the biggest challenges to successful e-commerce fulfilment? Well, there are many and we can’t do justice to them in a single article so we’ve picked out three that are going to be presenting real issues to the e-commerce sector through the rest of this year and well into 2023. First on our list, the perennial challenge of finding the right location.
Simply put, the nearer your fulfilment centres are to the customers, the shorter the distance purchases have to travel, the cheaper and quicker your logistics and the happier your customers … Read More
What makes a warehouse operation better? Efficiency.
It sounds so simple, but before we can even begin to improve efficiency, we need to establish what that means for each organisation and then work out how to measure it.
To begin, you need to undertake some kind of audit. Hopefully your warehouse space has already been audited, but if not, here are some things to consider. It’s important to measure inventory and safety as well as efficiency.
When exploring efficiency make sure you look at:
The warehousing industry has spent time and money trying to predict the effects of Brexit – from consultancies to crystal balls, there are few things that haven’t been tried! Today, we’ve got a clearer idea where the Brexit chips are going to fall and there are some strong clear trends that we can recognise.
The warehousing and logistics industries have been hit doubly hard by the current employment crisis, because problems in one of these sectors has had a domino effect in the other. If warehousing isn’t fulfilling its orders, the logistics … Read More
We are in unprecedented times. After the pressures of stockpiling for Brexit, the warehousing industry now faces a new challenge fuelled by the Covid-19 pandemic. Never in our lifetimes have we experienced a global pandemic like Covid-19 and its impact will surely be felt for many years to come. Over the past 3 months, we’ve seen a significant shift in our economy. Businesses across every sector have had to rapidly adapt to the new environment to survive.
Consumer buying habits have, according to Logistics Manager, changed as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Over the past few months, the … Read More
The Encyclopedia Britannica defines Artificial intelligence (AI) as:
“… the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. The term is frequently applied to the project of developing systems endowed with the intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience.”
Effective warehousing and logistics is the fundamental core function of the industry.
Your business will succeed or fail based upon how you address these important factors. An effective manager will be constantly discovering innovative methods to improve his or her company’s performance.
Why not remember the 4 R’s for continuous improvement:
Research…Reflect…Review…Refine
Fully automated warehouses are flexible, reliable, fast and efficient. They allow for improved warehousing and goods distribution and optimum material flow. Processes such as the storage, retrieval and relocation of goods efficiently proceed automatically.
These fulfillment centres or third-party logics (3PL) warehouses, where incoming orders are received, processed and filled, will become fully automated in ten years’ time, say Amazon. (Brian Merchant – Gizmodo UK – 2nd May 2019)