The economy has been doing a lot of acrobatics recently. In order to secure a more successful and long standing company, it’s a great idea to reduce your warehouse costs, increase warehouse productivity and decrease your operational expenses. Succeeding in these three areas could be the difference in weathering these economic shifts with grace or belly flopping and sinking.
1. Optimize Technology
Improving your supply chain is important to your bottom line. A 3PL warehousing solution is optimized in a way that gives your company the best advantage. This includes inventory management, transitioning to cloud based data management and scalability. Keeping abreast of new trends are another key piece of the technological puzzle that will increase both efficiency and productivity.
2. Use Cross Docking
This ingenious method of cutting out the middleman can save you a lot of time and money. Cross docking is when you facilitate the movement of products directly from the supplier to consumer. It cuts the costs of delivery, labor, storage and product management.
3. Choose Used
When possible, opt for used storage containers to ship and store inventory. This allows you to pass savings on to consumers while improving your profit margins. Reputable used vendors offer inspected and guaranteed storage containers.
4. Optimize Storage
With so many hiccups in the global supply chain, it’s easy to be tempted to stockpile inventory. But with stockpiling comes the need for storage. Other storage optimization remedies include access to physical structure, product placement, warehouse flow and retrieval methods. The layout, design and flow of your warehouse are key to managing costs.
5. Know Your Inventory
It’s important that you have the right inventory in the right place when it needs to be there. In order to achieve this, you’ll need to know how to categorize and organize it. This is where inventory analytics are most helpful. The end result is increased profitability, efficiency and productivity.
6. Theft Protection
In a perfect world, we’d all be able to trust one another to do the right thing. But sometimes inventory goes missing. Catching theft early and dealing with it straight away is the best course of action. Some things to pay attention to when investigating warehouse theft include:
- Missing or strange invoices.
- Conflicting stock quantities and sales records.
- Decreased sales when certain employees are working.
7. Equipment Uses
Wherever possible, use your equipment wisely. If a piece of equipment can be used for multiple tasks, use it for those tasks. Don’t get another piece of equipment to do the same thing if it can be avoided. It’s also important to keep detailed maintenance records and to perform routine maintenance to ensure the proper working of all machines.
8. Benchmarking
When you’re doing your benchmarking, you want to make sure that your goals are aligned with global industry best practices. Thinking globally may seem like a lot to consider, but with so many options available to consumers who are not limited by their geographic location, a global mindset is absolutely necessary.
As you get into all of the ways your business operates, you’ll be able to better visualize the areas where you can cut costs. Because so many aspects are integrated, every cut you make will likely allow for another, leading to a much more streamlined operation.