Effective inventory management is always a delicate dance between the cost associated with carrying too much inventory and the risk of not carrying enough to fulfill a customer order at the right moment. With ongoing pressure to ship orders within compressed timeframes, there’s no room for error, and competitors are always on your heels. It’s critical to unearth new ways to generate savings and efficiency at every turn. Cross-docking often leads the opportunity list with its ability to minimize material handling costs and get inbound products prepped for shipment at lightning speed.
Although the practice of cross-docking has been around for quite a while, many organizations shy away from implementing it because they think it’s more work than it actually is. In doing this, they forfeit cost and efficiency benefits that can help them better meet customer demands, particularly for specialty items.
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Tags: cross-docking,
customer demands,
goods,
IDN,
inventory,
labor costs,
material handling,
order fulfillment,
order profile,
picking,
put-away,
receiving,
shipping,
specialty items,
storage location,
warehouse,
warehouse management software,
warehouse management system
Increasingly we are seeing distributors being pinched between spiraling shipping costs and rising customer expectations. Orders are getting smaller and customers are demanding faster and faster delivery methods, all without expecting to pay anything extra to cover the additional costs of the shipping. I thought it might be interesting to reach out to a market-leading regional distributor and discuss what they are doing to figure out this last mile transportation problem.
I interviewed Rory Mueller, Logistics Manager at Werner Electric Supply to see how they took this increasingly complex problem and turned it into a market advantage and a key differentiator for doing business with them.
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Tags: accurate forecasts,
Amazon,
carrying costs,
competitive advantage,
complex distribution,
courier,
delivery,
delivery management,
delivery methods,
distribution,
distributors,
electrical supplies,
electrical supply,
FedEx,
inventory,
last mile,
local delivery,
logistics,
logistics program,
shipping,
shipping costs,
transportation,
transportation management,
UPS,
vehicles,
Werner Electric Supply
In the movie Big, Tom Hanks plays a child trapped in the body of a 30-year-old who challenges the status quo at a toy manufacturer. To the audience it all makes sense as the movie progresses – think like a kid when selling stuff to kids. How revolutionary! Yet the audience also relates to the adults who pretend to know what kids like.
For me, the big thinking in this movie is demonstrated by the creativity of a child whose mind is unencumbered by preconceptions.
Dr. David Schwartz, the author of a book entitled The Magic of Big Thinking, attempts to define big thinking. He explains that visualization adds value to everything and that thinking big means training oneself to see not just what is, but what can be. Author Malcolm Gladwell writes, “A visionary is a person that takes a white piece of paper and re-imagines the world”. The Internet is full of success stories of such visionaries.
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Tags: distribution,
Dr. David Schwartz,
healthcare,
iTopia,
Malcolm Gladwell,
packing,
patent,
patient care,
picking,
re-imagining,
reimagining,
shipping,
The Magic of Big Thinking,
thinking big,
trademark,
visualization,
visuals,
voice,
voice-activated,
warehouse
