Image Enabling The Supply Chain

  This best practice is about something called dimensioning of SKU’s in warehouse. Dimensioning of products is done by capturing the length width and height of the products. Boxes in which the products are being shipped are also dimensioned. These boxes are tracked as they are moved across with products capturing all the dimensions such as length, width, height, weight, volume and also the other attributes. The item master attributes of a product corresponds to the size of the products. Some expensive electronic goods does not come with serial number tracking, and some items will be conveyable and others will be non-conveyable. And also some of the items are easy to sort and some are difficult. All these aspects will be focused as part of the  dimensioning process , because that is the first time the product hits the dock door or product hits the DC. None would have seen the physical nature of the product. The vendor would have probably sent an ASN and you automatically create...

  What are chargebacks? Chargebacks are fines that retailers impose on suppliers because the Retailers are doing extra work to process the Supplier’s product through the Retailer’s Supply Chain. Why are suppliers getting chargebacks? Because Supplier’s shipments are not fully in compliance with the requirements set by the retailers on how the shipments should be arriving at the Retailer’s distribution center If a supplier is not fully following the compliance requirements, then that needs to be addressed first. So dedicate a person to this activity, there are people called Compliance specialists available that know how to get this right, they have a lot of experience working with specific retailers or you will have to review the routing guide. However a very good chargeback system will show your people the mistakes being made If you are doing everything correctly, then still getting chargebacks, then the chargeback management system will absolutely help you Are you including all th...

  During one of my implementations, I was talking to this DC Director, this was a lady that had this amazing knack to formulate processes completely on the fly, that worked for their complicated manufacturing and distribution center, that was handling a lot of these eye glass prescriptions. The challenge with this operation was that their product was very small and also very fragile, which means it is pretty much a norm to break a lens before a vision/glass prescription is fulfilled completely, which means the same order would go through the processes multiple times. Basically the process was the order would get downloaded into the WMS that was running the distribution center and this order could come from any one of the 20 or so systems that were feeding orders to these guys, then the closest lens would get picked, which would get sent to the manufacturing center, where the product would get tracked inside the manufacturing process where it would be ground to the specification in ...

  This is another video on the best practices that you could follow while loading the product in your distribution center. One important thing that you could do is applying the right labels on the product, because when people see the labels they would be careful while handling these products, the  pallet , and the merchandise. When you tell them with the label ahead of time they will be a lot more careful about doing their job and this is even more about human psychology. For example to my developers I prepared this design document, so what we do and that’s a rule that we follow throughout our organization. We put a lot of care in preparing the design spec or whatever we do if it’s a screenshot we do a lot of care and prepare a thorough document that not only addresses all the requirements but also looks clean and nice and because when things are beautiful and they look clean people trust them more. So the same psychology applies here as well, when you are shipping something y...

  Quote “We export a lot of our products through the containers. LoadProof is easy to document such loads that are being exported because I can take pictures super fast, upload them to the cloud and the pictures stay there for ever. I can share those pictures with anybody, in case of a claims situation or if there any questions on the condition of the product when it was loaded. I find LoadProof very useful for my business and I would highly recommend for others as well. LoadProof is fast, easy, and very user friendly. Convenient way to track loads, quality issues, and even safety incidents for your business needs. Not only we were up and running in one day, we started seeing value from day one”.  – Tim Campbell, Executive General Manager, XPO Logistics Click here to continue reading this article.

  Your Business You distribute food products, which could fall under Dry, Produce or Frozen categories You distribute alcohol products You distribute pharma products While doing this you often run into OSD issues, Overage, Shortages and Damages Overages – You shipped more than ordered, which could result in non-compliance chargeback Shortages – You shipped less than what was ordered, which could result in non-compliance chargeback Damages – Your products arrived damaged, which would result in a rejected load or a damage claim While shipping food products it is also very important to clean the trailers thoroughly in order to comply with FDA requirements, I had a customer once they would write lines and lines of cleanliness description in the system after washing their trailers thoroughly, so just in case something happens, they can go back to their customer and show them how well they have been cleaning the trailers Another challenge while shipping produce or frozen items is that, y...

  Here is another tip from our supply chain expert on chargebacks. We have this conversation with warehouse shippers and we run into some really interesting dynamics. Obviously organizations are paying and they are siloed. Sometimes operations managers don’t know what the CEO and CFO is concerned about.  If everything was great in an ideal organization then everyone would know everything. They are all singing the same song, but when we run into some ground realities it is not the same.  They take pictures, but when we ask about the pain of taking photos in their organization when they ship their product from their organization when it’s leaving from the  outbound dock  and inbound dock the true realities we come to know. When you’re receiving a product from someone else do you take pictures they’re like “oh yes absolutely or we take pictures all the time”. The next question  we ask them is where they store them, what happens to those pictures, and how they ...

  This best practice should be followed while loading. Loading is an important function when you’re shipping something to a customer or a retailer. You could have done a great job picking the order, packing the order, stacking the boxes in the pallets nicely all that you could have done, but if you don’t load your products or merchandise or pallets properly all the work that you’ve done is going to go away. It’s because when a bunch of boxes are stacked in pallets and when they travel in the truck there are a lot of bumps on the road. I mean the truck will have all the best shock absorbers and all that but in spite of that there are a lot of bumps on the road and there is a lot of traffic and there are obviously crazy drivers.  When the driver is driving and when he is applying brakes and when he is going over steep hills there are g-forces that act on the product that you shipped. The product tends to move, shake, and tends to fall. It’s very important that you get to load it...

  What are chargebacks? Chargebacks are fines that retailers impose on suppliers because the Retailers are doing extra work to process the Supplier’s product through the Retailer’s Supply Chain. Why are suppliers getting chargebacks? Because Supplier’s shipments are not fully in compliance with the requirements set by the retailers on how the shipments should be arriving at the Retailer’s distribution center If a supplier is not fully following the compliance requirements, then that needs to be addressed first. So dedicate a person to this activity, there are people called Compliance specialists available that know how to get this right, they have a lot of experience working with specific retailers or you will have to review the routing guide. However a very good chargeback system will show your people the mistakes being made If you are doing everything correctly, then still getting chargebacks, then the chargeback management system will absolutely help you Are you including all th...

  This next best practice that you can implement in your distribution center is something called vendor performance. So vendor performance is basically you as a retailer or a distributor or as an ecommerce order fulfiller you are buying your product from different vendors.  When the vendor ship to your DC, you can rate them on how well they are doing in terms of  compliance . Compliance requirements are mandatory in all of the big ecom warehouses. For example let’s take Walmart or Staples or Amazon, all these big distribution companies handle larger merchandise, which is being pushed through their supply chain. They need a lot of automation, material handling equipment, sorters, conveyors, and robots for moving these merchandise, which are products through their distribution center. They are all sent it to their stores and for fulfilling orders. When they have all this material handling equipment robots and everything, they can accept only certain box sizes, certain label...

  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 same location twice which is also known as zig-zagging.  Optimizing the picking process will make your picking operators to walk less. Unproductive labor such as unproductive walking due to skipping does not directly translate to picking. The more you pick the more you can ship, the more you ship the more you can invoice and the more you invoice, the more money you make.  It’s important to follow the location sequence as it makes everything optimum. I’ve seen in some WMS where while they are picking from the current loca...

  This post is about the best practices to track the velocity of your SKUs which is important to know as a DC manager and as a director of DC. As a supply chain inventory manager of your supply chain you got to know what are your A SKU’s, what are your B SKU’s, what are your C SKU’s. A SKUs are the fastest moving SKUs and the B SKUs are the moderately moving SKUs and C SKUs are the slow moving SKUs. The last thing you want to know is how to slot your A SKUs, slotting all the way far at the back of the DC will make the operators to walk more. That’s why it’s very important to know your fast moving SKUs like A+ SKUs, which is even faster. There are even more fast moving SKUs that could be a seasonal phenomenon that happens only during the peaker holiday season, where someone is ordering a specific SKU like a not very popular toy or a very popular gift item for all their friends and family. Recently we had a customer that went live, there was a Rachael Ray’s Evoo bottle which was one ...

  If you are looking to upgrade your  WMS  or if you’re getting a new WMS or switching to another WMS or if this is your first time WMS, here’s the another feature to consider. This feature is called cartonization. Cartonization is done among the different carton box sizes that you have for your order, whatever items that are being shipped in that order, you find the smallest box that will hold these items of the order in a pretty tight fashion with enough dunnage. Cartonization helps you to reduce your transportation costs significantly and especially if you do a lot of parcels. If you do rate shopping between FedEx, UPS and USPS you could get even more savings. Cartonization has a lot of other capabilities such as nesting logic and there are a lot of things that come with that you could take advantage of. We had an interesting problem with one of our clients. Their WMS will figure out the fit of all the items in a small box but sometimes the operators would struggle to ...

This is another best practice that you can follow while you’re loading your products in the trailer container. It’s always important to do a great job loading and obviously your team did a great job picking the product, boxing the product, and then nicely stacking them in pallets. The pallets are then shrink-wrapped and ready to go.  It’s important to load them perfectly because while the truck or the trailer is going there are a lot of bumps on the road, there’s a lot of traffic and the truck could go steep uphill and steep downhill. I’ve driven so much in the Tennessee area, into the mountains and all kinds of things happen. When all these happen there are G forces that act on the merchandise that you’ve shipped which could shake the product and also tilt the product sometimes.  If you have expensive  SKUs , these unnecessary shakes can still create damages. Even though the truck or the trailer might have the best shock absorber it’s not a good thing as your product mig...

  Here is another interesting dynamic about  LoadProof . Apparently somebody in their organization is interested and somebody saw the value of the product – LoadProof provides.  We get to talk to them and they’re curious. They want to learn more, and in our conversation this comes up: “hey we already use Google Drive, and we store pictures in Google Drive and and it was great for us”. This was actually a very interesting story. An intern from Georgia Tech, pretty smart kid, but they don’t understand all the implications of using an enterprise system for a recognized supply chain environment. In an established supply chain network, you’re dealing with so many different partners such as vendors, customers, transportation service providers, lumpers, etc., Supply chain is a huge community.  When you spend some time in the industry you understand all these different players and how to work with them and how to maintain the data integrity and still do business maintaining ...

  This best practice is about applying the seal especially when it is a FTL’s shipment. FTL a full truck load container shipment trailer that’s going from point A to point B.  It’s important to apply the seal and the seal number, and take the picture of that seal number and upload it to  LoadProof  so in case if you are a recipient or if you are a shipper you can see the photograph. If you’re a recipient you can ask the person on the origin side and say “hey give me this photograph”, or if you’re shipping you can take the picture of the seal number and say “hey look at it we did everything, we locked this thing perfectly and we applied a seal and here is the know picture of the seal and there is a seal number on it.  This is very common in international shipments, in the international containers because it’s one big container going from point A to point B. You can do that and also this is something interesting that I’ve observed, if the shipment is coming from i...