Shipping materials to various facilities or sending out finished products to various consumers can often prove to be a logistical nightmare. Facilities and warehouses can easily be overwhelmed, resulting in bad logistic techniques that end up costing the company a great deal of money. Streamlining your logistics process is going to be a major factor in your company’s success, no matter what sector of the industry you’re in. To help you in this regard, let’s go over 5 easy steps that will help you improve efficiency, reduce costs, and increase customer satisfaction.
Location, Location, Location:
A big part of creating a more manageable system of logistics is knowing where to place distribution centers and warehouses. This knowledge will be based upon understanding where your products are primarily shipping off to. Rather than simply picking a few major cities across a certain swath of a region, analyze the precise locations of where everything is typically headed. This will give you a better idea of where distribution centers and warehouses need to be located, even if it means putting these facilities in smaller areas.
The key here is that you have warehouse facilities strategically placed that allow for the fastest and most sensible means of shipment and storage. Also keep in mind the locations of your suppliers/vendors. This will help improve logistics by creating a more streamlined process of moving goods from place to place down the supply train.
Optimizing Warehouses:
Apart from maintaining optimal locales for your warehouse facilities, you also need to ensure that these facilities are operating as efficiently and accurately as possible. Something that would go a long way toward ensuring this would be investing in various storage and organization products, such as containers, bin organizers, and stackable storage units. The more organized your warehouse is the fewer obstacles you’re going to have to face.
When goods can be stored and accessed easily and accurately, the time it takes to process shipments will be significantly reduced, and customer satisfaction will be increased. You can also save a lot of money by buying these products used, and then selling your own similar products back to companies like Container Exchanger.
Improve Software Technology:
A lot of the run-around that workers experience can be reduced through the implementation of various types of computer software. Rather than relying exclusively on people to pass along instructions, you can use various forms of technology that will relay to various warehouse facilities different instructions regarding tasks needing to be performed. Shipments and replenishment orders can be automatically sent to multiple facilities, and transit reports can also be relayed back to various facilities in order to update personnel as quickly as possible.
Timing:
When you’re focusing on shipments, timing is also going to play a crucial role in how well you’re able to manage and improve logistics of your company. Most businesses find it a better option to do most of their shipping during hours when there are fewer people on the roads, such as late at night. This reduces the amount of traffic that vehicles have to deal with, and therefore lowers transportation costs, which in turn allows for more money to be invested elsewhere in the business.
Feedback:
Focus not only on getting feedback from your customers and clients regarding the quality of shipment, but also from employees. Not everyone can be involved in every single level of the shipping process, so paying attention to an individual worker’s suggestion can go a long way in pinpointing key areas to improve logistics.