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 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…

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…

3PL Panacea: The Flexible Mobile Supply Chain Platform

The third-party logistics (3PL) business is tough, because it covers a wide gamut of service offerings, that include some combination of: Just move my boxes and/or pallets. Move my boxes and/or pallets and store them in your warehouse. Move my boxes and/or pallets and operate my facility. Own all the labor and activities in my facility. Offer all distribution services for my product (All I will do is download my orders into your system/supply chain)….

Supply Chain Hungry for Legal Tool Innovation

Technology changes quickly. Other fields, such as legal and finance, are comparatively slow to evolve. (A friend’s daughter recently told me she chose the finance discipline for that reason: to avoid having to constantly learn new technologies.) Changes do come though, especially as organizations move to keep up with financial reporting requirements. At the same time, technologist know that if you miss one technology way, it’s possible to catch the next one successfully.  In 1999,…

Case in Point: Real Insights from an IoT Pilot in a Distribution Center

It’s one thing to rave about the benefits that IoT will deliver to a distribution center, but it’s another to get a look at how it really adds value and provides actionable insights. Let’s take a look at one experience I had recently. Recently, I was at a prospect site for a pilot demonstrating our technology. Typically, we show up at the client site Monday morning and get things up and running in an hour….

The Power of Music in Supply Chain

Conventional wisdom dictates that a picture is worth a thousand words and stories are worth a thousand pictures. I believe that…and I use stories in my presentation regularly. Of course, picking the right story is critical to making the biggest impact. Sometimes, though, I have an audience that speaks a completely different language. How do you communicate to inspire then? I think the answer is music. My daughter has been singing since she was five,…