Supply chain logistics is an industry in itself and at present a booming one. It’s a chain of activities, and if one link breaks or gets disturbed, the entire chain is haywire. Warehousing is part of the supply chain and today every business needs warehousing services. Time plays an important role in warehousing operations. But how? Let’s understand this in the next section of the article.
As soon as an order is placed for an inventory, the next steps involve picking, packing, and sending it for delivery. Here, time plays an important part to deliver the order at the right place and on time, and to do that, a lot of thinking and planning goes into the process. Let’s see how it can be done.
Know the chain
Let’s start with order placement, then the next step is to find and get the inventory from the available stock, quality check, pack it, and arrange for transport. It’s a long and tedious process, but not difficult to understand as a lot goes into the puzzle to the final picture. Many departments come in tandem but it is a step by step to complete the whole process.
Understanding and eliminating bottlenecks
While setting an order for a dispatch, it might happen that you come across a hurdle that might cause a delay. The hurdle might be anything from a vehicle not being available to weather conditions, it might be a manual or a natural hurdle, whatever it is, you have to be ready to confront it and solve the problem.
Think of strategies to rely upon
Today, most of the supply chain process is automated but it still involves a lot of manual labor and intervention to move an inventory from its original location to the final location. So, in case something goes wrong, there are strategies to fall back. A supply chain is like a flow chart, each step is separate from the other but inter dependable, hence if one link breaks, it can topple, so be sure that you have strategies and alternatives ready for any obstacles.
Streamlining process
The best step is to streamline the process and get things in order. To get the consignment reach the customer, it requires a lot of effort and each step has to be performed meticulously up to the final process. To be precise, each step and everyone has to take accountability and get the work done just right. The process has to be created and documented and followed religiously to make the delivery happen. If any issue occurs that has to be understood carefully and improvised.
Make automation work
Today with technology, many tools are available in the market that works well. Now, manual labour is not required to do meager jobs like labeling, packing, loading, and unloading. Machines can do all these jobs and employees can be used for better jobs. Automated machines can help you get much information that was impossible before viz, where to stock goods, empty space analysis, route optimization, which truck to use for transport, and many more. Tools can help you in many ways to get your orders delivered faster.
Organizing & managing
Plan and organize, that is how the process works. Classifying and organizing make jobs easier like grouping similar items together.
Gathering and working with analytics
With automated tools, you get any data in any format at your fingertips at soon as possible. With the available data, you can easily identify the loopholes and improvise on them for a better supply chain process.
Distribution
Today, customers want quick delivery hence centralizing inventory in one place is not a good decision, decentralize it to different locations for faster movement of it. With that try to increase parallelization that will optimize cost as consignment can be delivered easily from a closer distribution center to a customer.
These are some of the pointers that you can implement in your warehouse for saving time and manual labour. This will also help you with that timely delivery of consignment that you yearn for.