The Warehouse Rate Shopping Best Practice to Reduce Shipping Charges

This best practice we are going to discuss is called as rate shopping. The rate shopping can be done for both parcel and the (Less than Load) LTL. I mean the parcels are the small boxes that they ship mostly as Ecom orders. Sometimes they also ship retail orders as parcels from the distribution center to the final destination. In Ecom orders it will be a consumer that’s buying product, they place an order on…

The DC Quality Control Best Practices to Improve Shipping Efficiency

This is a best practice that you can refer to if you have a lot of quality issues in your distribution center. Let us assume that for some reason you opened up the box from reserve. You thought that everything was okay at the time of receiving. Then you put it away in reserve and for replenishment you moved the product from reserve to active location. After opening up the box you find that there…

The 3 Best Practices to Run Effective Warehouse Meetings

This best practice is about running the warehouse meetings effectively. It’s basic and I learnt a great deal from consultants and doing consulting myself, the consultants gets billed at a high rate. For eg. I have been to sites where I got billed and the value we brought to the table as a team and it was always highly challenging. The complicated problems we solve for them and imagine one hour of my time is…

The Sequencing Best Practice to Boost Warehouse Order Picking Efficiency

This best practice is known as location sequencing. It means that when you are configuring your locations for picking purposes, replenishment, and for put-away purposes in the reserve area in the top level position. While doing this you would have picked the naming convention to streamline the picking. On top of it there is also the ability to configure something called as the location sequencing. It means that you do not want your pickers to…

The Best Practices in Measuring Warehouse KPIs for Enhancing Productivity

This best practice is about measuring and improving warehouse productivity through LMS, which stands for labor management system. There are typically two segments of customers that will benefit significantly from an LMS, one is this huge ERP – vendor who supplies WMS. For example we will take SAP.   SAP’s core was ERP and they still developed and integrated the WMS because many of their customers have integration challenges with other platforms. They gave them the…

The Best Practices in Designing UI/UX of the Warehouse Management App

This best practice is about the importance of UI (User Interface) in improving the distribution center productivity. In this day and age where Apple and Android have completely changed the user experience that is so easy to understand and use the app. Particularly in the distribution center the time is spent significantly on training the end users. I’ve seen many distribution centers that are literally revolving doors, where personnel come and go. All these personnel…

4 Best Practices in the Inventory Management through LPNs

This best practice that you implement in your supply chain is to Keep Track of Stock Movements through LPN (License Plate Number). You can make it a rule in your in your DC (Distribution Center) that any product which may be just one unit or two units or three units whatever it is any product, group of products, any set of products that you’re moving always gets an LPN.  LPN could be even called as…

The 5 Best Practices in the Directed Putaway to Improve Productivity

This warehouse best practice is called the directed putaway. Putaway is a process of moving the product after receiving at the receiving dock. The product gets received and either cases were built or the pallets were built and now these cases and pallets have to be put-away in their reserve location. The way it works is the product is moved from the receiving area to the reserve area in so many different ways. The user…

The Best Practices in Cross-docking with Benefits

This distribution center best practice is called the cross-docking. Cross-docking is basically sending a product you are sending from one dock to another dock i.e. from the receiving dock to the outbound shipping dock directly without any intermediary processes. Cross-docking makes it so much efficient because you don’t have to send it to the reserve and then again from reserve to the active location and then pick from the active location. In the cross-docking process…