Image Enabling The Supply Chain

  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...

  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 are quality issues.  Sometimes during the picking stage they pick the product and they find some defective products or torn apparel. So you realize  that you got to have a good quality process even before the picking process because what happens is typically as the shipment hits your receiving dock you can sort the product by PO or sort the product by  SKU . After sorting you will do the receiving process and then you will do the verification process of the shipment. Verification of the shipment basically says whether you have done verification that means you have completel...

  I would think that electronics OEMs or distributors would be leading the charge toward quality, and I’m sure many of them are. However, the first time I encountered a quality department that did extensive quality control it was in a New Hampshire distribution center (DC) that served the apparel industry. For this manufacturer, the goal was to make fairly priced clothing that delivered good quality to middle-aged women. The Director of Quality at the warehouse, along with her team, did such a good job that this retailer was known for its quality. To meet their quality goals, workers spent a lot of time measuring the tops and pants against strict criteria, checking the cut of the pieces, figuring out how the pieces would look on real people, and making sure that the colors were good for a variety of skin tones. They thought of everything. They took pictures and shared infractions with their vendors across the supply chain. Click here to continue reading this article.

  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 ...

  I still remember the very first time I saw this thing called the Internet. It was July 1997 and I got an after-hours glimpse at the German multinational company where I worked. To the music of a vacuum cleaner wielded by cleaning staff, I clicked on the new-fangled Netscape Browser, typed a request into something called altavista.com and saw my first website: Mercedes Benz. My dream was to buy a  Mercedes Benz E220D  someday—and I wanted to see the car come alive on the screen. I wasn’t impressed: it looked like an electronic brochure, not different than a newspaper or a magazine. Fast-forward a year and a half to June 1999: I had moved the United States and was focused on working late and learning fast. Those were the years of the .com boom and the .com bust. Everyone was trying to figure out how to monetize the Internet. Then, Internet access was easy to get, email was entrenched, and individuals were starting to buy online and even had their own Web pages.  I or...

  Buying from a Vendor that specializes in this domain is better than building it yourself Today, IT technology is one of the biggest enablers of supply chain efficiency. Organizations, then, are aware that finding or creating the right capabilities is central to business success. When enterprises contemplate implementing complicated IT infrastructure, whether it is hardware, software, systems or anything else associated with such infrastructure, they are faced with a major decision: whether to buy this thing from a vendor or build it themselves. It is important to make the correct decision, or else you might be setting up yourself for a disaster.  Let’s consider the options by weighing the pros and cons of each approach. Build it with your own team This approach involves an IT team with the right skillset and expertise. A project manager, one that has a proven ability to deliver in this domain, would be a critical element well. Pros This approach, properly managed, could achi...

  Amazon is the elephant in the room where any supply chain conversation is happening. Everyone is chasing  that Amazon effect . Everyone is trying to figure out how to deliver on the expectations of customers that Amazon and its business models have created. Retrofitting Amazon’s strategies or tactics for another business is tough. In terms of order volume and order profile, Amazon is its own kind of beast. At the same time, it makes sense to look at some of Amazon’s most groundbreaking tactics to see what lessons can be learned by electronics distributors. Trying to be Amazon won’t work, of course. However, there are ways to improve operations in ways that take into account your operating environment, merchandise profiles, and business realities. 1. Amazon Prime Amazon Prime, the annual subscription offering from Amazon, is a master stroke. You could argue that they copied the Costco model with a yearly membership fee, but added a wealth of value in addition to two-day shipp...

  Getting products into hands of the customer quickly and efficiently is quickly moving from a differentiation to table stakes. As expectation of buyers increase,  distribution centers must look for new ways to get things done  correctly and efficiently. Consider these realities: Often, the picking process is the most time-consuming process off all, making it a potential bottleneck. More orders picked translate to more orders shipped. That leads to quicker invoicing and increased revenues. Picking also directly impacts throughput metrics, so that improving the productivity and speed of the picking process, directly improves distribution center throughput. Throughput is the measure of inventory that is received into the inbound dock doors and shipped through the outbound dock doors by fulfilling orders. Bringing a variety of best practices to bear can create nearly instantaneous benefit. 1. Follow location sequence for the pick path When pickers pick travelling in a well-d...

  We’re going to discuss another best practice that you can implement in your distribution center (DC). These practices need some more work to implement, like you have to design your systems, your process and so forth. This is not something that you can implement tomorrow or day after tomorrow, without process changes, systemic changes. But this is good to know because when you’re upgrading next time or when you’re implementing a brand new WMS for your distribution center this is something definitely you want to think about. This is about the best practices in using ASN. An ASN is called an Advance Shipment Notice, that means you are getting a notice ahead of time that what is going to come to your Distribution Center (DC). It means what are the benefits of knowing what is going to hit your DC, your receiving dock. There are a lot of benefits when you have that information in prior, you can plan better in terms of receiving, have people ready to receive the product and you can plan...

  Another best practice that you can implement in your distributions center is something called appointment scheduling. So basically what this means is when the truck drivers are arriving to your DC or when when they’re about to come to your DC they call ahead through their transportation companies and say “hey please give me an appointment, and I’m going to be there at this time, this date”. Booking the appointment makes it easy to make sure when the truck arrives you have  a dock door that’s open and people that are ready to receive this product, so the truck driver can come drop off the shipment and then leave. From a transportation perspective it is very efficient for them. When you work with them by having an appointment, and not make them wait then you will be able to get better deals with the transportation provider. This is helpful especially if you’re paying for the freight transportation.  I still remember, it’s so fresh in my mind and this was as part of MBA – ...

  The Internet will disappear. There will be so many IP addresses, so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with, that you won’t even sense it. It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in the room. —  Eric Schmidt, Google chairman in 2015 In the world today, everything is connected and everything is becoming smart. We have smart homes, smart cities, a smart grid and even smart transportation. Soon, a lot of our daily interactions will be with tools that have intelligence, including potentially refrigerators, bottles, food containers, clothes washers, clothes dryers, dishwashers, and more. Soon, our refrigerators will be smart enough to order and get milk and other essentials delivered right to our door, before we realize we’ve run out. Our cookers will have food cooked and ready for us ...

  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 will find the first open location and just stick the load there and that is called the suggested put-away, and this is not completely the user directed put-away. In the user-directed put-away, user just finds the hole and sticks the load there and it is a complete wrong way of putting the loads. It makes sense when the volume is so low, but in a high volume scenario you need to follow a systematic process directed put-away which makes a lot of sense because you could configure your rules, based on the segmentation of the products like consumer goo...

  This best practices 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 a case number, it should be always applied to the products, even if it is one product or two product that moves together in the DC.  The second rule is you should always scan this LPN into a location, it could be a  dock door location , it could be receiving, staging location in the dock-door or it could be some problem location or it could be an exceptional hospital Lane.It always helps you to find the product and improves visibility by providing details on what the product is, where it is located in your huge facility. This will help you to exactly locate the product,...

  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 WMS and because their core is ERP there is no solid LMS that works. They should be buying some other LMS and integrate into the SAP’s – WMS which is a cumbersome process.  The second thing is that there are small companies with just a hundred thousand square feet or two hundred or three thousand square feet with anywhere of revenue from 10 million to let’s say hundred million, two hundred million. They don’t have sophisticated LMS and for that reason they are not able to measure their employees wor...

  This is another interesting question that came from one of our customers and this was like “hey we have this problem where we are shipping these pallets and somehow these pallets are broken into two and and they get delivered as two different pallets”. Even though they tell the carrier or whoever they are shipping through that nobody’s supposed to be doing that.  What they found out was that the solution was to fully shrink wrap the pallet and then fully seal it with a security tape around the pallet and then add a sign saying “do not separate pallet”. There are stickers that you can use as a label or even print a sheet of paper and then add do not separate pallets in a different color or even in a red color so that they know they’re not supposed to separate this pallet.  Also it’s better to apply a security tape so if the security tape is tampered with, you can show “hey look at these pictures when it left our facility this is how it was shipped and it’s all supposed t...

  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 ...