Are you overpaying for convenience or location? It’s not easy to compare 3PL vs. 3PL, or even your own warehouse so you know for sure if you are getting value for your money. But there are some basic assumptions you can make to help you understand what you’re dealing with, the costs the 3PL may experience, and reasonable costs for your storage projects.
Tags: Pallet Rack, 3PL, storage systems, warehouse, pallets, Third Party Logistics, ecommerce
Posted in Warehousing & Distribution|
At Modex 2012, Hytrol Conveyor’s Boyce Bonham sat down with DCVelocity to discuss distribution center sustainability. We’ve linked the video below, which is worth a few moments of your time. How do initiatives to work greener, smarter, and better affect warehouses and distribution operations? Not surprisingly, these initiatives often save money, at least over the long term.
Tags: Sustainability
Posted in Warehousing & Distribution|
Everyone likes to see how they’re doing vs. their industry peers. This isn’t just a natural urge to compare yourself, it’s a vital part of doing business.
Benchmarking, at the heart of it, is comparing your performance to others like you. You look at your business processes and outcomes, and how they stack up to the performance metrics of industry leaders, your peers, and the best from similar operations. In warehousing, it is particularly important to understand where you are, and where you could be with reconfigurations, tweaks, and innovations that others are using to improve their numbers. What do you specifically measure? Typically this can include quality, cost, and time. Specifically, it can get much more complex.
At the end it helps you understand the success of your peers and how you can reproduce that success.
Tags: ROI
Posted in Warehousing & Distribution|
In warehouse & manufacturing operations, things get broken. They break in a number of ways, and it’s expensive. You’ve probably seen product broken or damaged in amazing and improbable ways if you’ve been in this business for any length of time. We had a client once buy a bunch of mismatched, used industrial shelving (not from us), only to see it collapse and dump thousands of tiny aircraft components on the floor. It had to be swept up and discarded since it was all mixed up and visually impossible to sort.
Those are extraordinary examples, but everyday inventory damage that cost “only” a few hundred or thousand dollars can savage your bottom line.
Tags: warehousing, customer service, product damage, inventory control, damaged goods
Posted in Warehousing & Distribution|
Over the past four decades, we’ve seen plenty of operations move. We’ve installed entirely new conveyor systems into functioning operations without disturbing the flow of existing work. We’ve seen companies pick up an entire distribution operation and move it across two hundred feet of parking lot into another building. It’s not new territory for us, and if you have managed a manufacturing or warehousing operation long, it’s probably not for you either.
Posted in Warehousing & Distribution|
One easy way to gauge a warehouse or manufacturing plant’s effectiveness is to check how clean it is. Cleaner facilities are more productive, tend to be safer and tend to be more organized.
Whether your facility features gleaming floors or just keeps debris from packaging materials, pallets and accumulated junk under control, being cleaner is well worth the time investment. People who work in a disorganized facility where things just feel sloppy won’t work as well. They may make more errors. They won’t have pride in the operation. An inch of dust on rack beams or beneath conveyor legs sends a message to workers. You don’t need a sparkling facility with floors so clean you could have lunch on them, but a well-lit, organized, pleasant place to work can be helpful in employee attitudes and retention.
Tags: warehouse cleanliness, organization, warehousing
Posted in Warehousing & Distribution|
If you are in the warehousing or material handling industry, you’ll find yourself identifying warehouse and handling equipment in movies or television shows quite often. Many of us have seen, for instance, the NFL graphics of a large distribution system used on Fox network for years. I’ve pointed out Hytrol conveyors in movies to my wife for years, to the point where she says it first when she sees it.
For fun, we have put together a list of the more famous scenes in entertainment history involving material handling equipment, and how it could have been done better.
Tags: Material Handling, movies
Posted in Warehousing & Distribution|
In the last two decades, smart companies have identified the warehouse operation as a profit center, not a cost center. This is far from universal, but it inches toward that every day. No longer are warehouse managers considered box-hustlers – at least not in smart companies. Many are utilizing varying levels of automation. WMS is standard for larger operations and is making its way even to single-building, midsize and smaller ones.
Tags: Automation, ROI, Robotics
Posted in Warehousing & Distribution|
This is particularly true with supervisors who understand how kitting, ticketing, and storage operations. You want people who know the work, and who can supervise and motivate your employees. Qualified candidates are often the kind of people who aren’t online perusing jobs. They aren’t going to temp agencies. It’s a unique and difficult situation for warehousing operations. Quite often, they must be bilingual to supervise an increasingly Spanish-speaking workforce. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: labor
Posted in Warehousing & Distribution|
It’s important to control costs in your operation. What are some warehousing cost-cutting methods you can employ that don’t require extensive investment or re-tooling? Most of the costs of warehousing operations fall into the following categories:
Tags: Warehouse Management, Automation, employees, ergonomics, ROI, labor management, LCS
Posted in Warehousing & Distribution|
