Skip to main content

Top 5 Supply Chain Headaches Created by Retail | LoadProof

 


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 ordered my first cool watch, a Casio that displayed the time on glass over an analog set of hands. It cost $80. I sent the payment—and started waiting anxiously for the delivery. The promised day came and went, and then another and another. Finally, the UPS truck stopped at my door. The watch was cool—and I wore it and bragged that I had bought it on the Internet. Having a watch not available at nearby stores overcame the stress of delayed delivery. I was a happy customer.

A few weeks later, I had to travel to Columbus, OH, to support a go-live for a client that supported a third party Order Fulfillment Operation that shipped product on behalf of somebody else. When I visited them, I was able to see exactly what happened behind the scenes for online orders.  Back then, catalog companies were the first to adopt, and even create, e-commerce businesses.  The catalog model was simple: a catalog was sent to a prospective mailing list, and people read the catalog and made a call to place an order. The move to the Internet was easy to justify, because it eliminated printing and mailing catalog. Better still, SKUs could be made instantly available on the Internet, which allowed products to be ordered immediately. Eventually, every single retailer jumped to e-commerce as they realized that twice as many customers were ordering online compared to traditional retail brick and mortar stores.

The new world created a number of supply chain headaches that have continued to plague retailers and their distribution centers. These top the list:

  1. A new order profile.  To accommodate the new profile, processes in the distribution center (DC) needed to evolve. Before the inventory flow moved from a manufacturer to a wholesale distributor’s DC and then to a retail store. Consumers went to the store and took products from the shelves. Backend processes were designed to handle boxes with a bunch of units. In the e-commerce world, they had to be changed to pick one or two unit orders in an optimal fashion using either mechanized or non mechanized picking process and then consolidate those orders.
Click here to continue reading this article.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Optimize Your Warehouse Replenishments with these Best Practices | LoadProof

  This best practice is about making  replenishments  inside the warehouse. It is important to stay on the top off replenishments always in your warehouse. If you have just one shift that you are running it would help a lot. If you spend extra hours in the evening and then do the topping off all your active locations it will be helpful for the pickers in the next shift. In the next morning when the pickers come after all the locations will be full and they can start picking right away without wasting time in replenishments. If you have two shifts running either choose the second shift or have a third shift if possible and keep doing the top off replenishments. There are active replenishment locations and these active locations have Min and Max. Whenever your inventory falls below min, replenishments are going to get triggered or it will get triggered if there is an order that needs a lot of picks from a particular location. This will drive the location down which will tri...
Post a Comment
Read more

Picture Documentation for Freight Claims White Paper – Part I | LoadProof

  INTRODUCTION This document describes the benefits of an effective Picture Documentation System(PDS) that helps with getting Freight Claims Paid faster. An effective pictures documentation system helps with 1 – Get Freight Claims paid much faster by making pictures available quickly and easily, 2 – Provides visibility to the damages through pictures. The visibility gained provides insight into the handling mistakes made while the orders are fulfilled, so that the parties can determine and establish accountability boundaries and get the shipper paid. BACKGROUND What are Freight Claims? A freight claim is a legal demand by a shipper or a consignee to a carrier for financial reimbursement for a loss or a damage of a shipment. Freight Claims are claims submitted by manufacturers/suppliers/shippers to transportation vendors and or carriers, when the goods the Supplier shipped did not arrive at the destination in a pristine state. Instead it arrived as damaged, the packaging was damaged...
Post a Comment
Read more

3PL Panacea: The Flexible Mobile Supply Chain Platform | LoadProof

  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). I’ve even run into more complicated models of operation, including both tightly and loosely coupled models.  In a tightly-coupled model, the supply chain systems of the 3PL, including orders, inventory, transportation, advanced shipment notices, purchase orders, and more, are tightly integrated into the shipper’s supply chain systems. All this information seamlessly flows between both supply chain systems of the 3PL and the shipper. They stay in synch with each other and the parties perform the functions in their respective syst...
Post a Comment
Read more