With constant incoming product, replenishment and picking and shipping, the typical fulfillment center is a beehive of activity. When you add seasonal employees for the peak, the activity and the potential of injuries goes up dramatically.

Often, parts warehouses and inventories do not receive the attention needed to ensure that they operate efficiently and remain accurate. Some reasons we see this are that management perceives that parts departments don’t generate income for the company and they assume that parts should be easy to manage.

As we assist multichannel selling and industrial companies in selecting a new warehouse, we often see managers prematurely jump at seeing buildings and talking about costs. In our opinion, the most productive approach to planning a warehouse expansion is to outline your requirements first and then create a building requirements checklist to see how various buildings stack up.

As we consult with businesses on implementing Warehouse Management Systems (WMS), we see several reasons why implementations often take longer, exceed budget and cause management headaches. Here are four general reasons:

For some e-commerce and multichannel companies, using third party fulfillment (3PL) can be cost effective and provide high customer service as an option to internal fulfillment. As we consult with clients to assess the 3PL option, the burning question is this: “how will 3PL costs compare to my internal fulfillment?”

Inventory is typically the largest balance sheet asset in most companies. Accurate inventory is required to deliver timely and accurate customer service as well as calculate profitability correctly.

In performing operational assessments on companies and trying to find ways to improve storage capacity and increase the total order throughput, one of the major alternatives to moving to a new facility is to look at adding mezzanines to the existing building.

For many companies, seasonal hiring is an absolute necessity. The quality and the number of hourly workers can mean success or failure in fulfillment and your company’s service and profitability.

Some days you might feel like you’re caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Like clockwork, carriers increase their charges. The competition is absorbing more of their shipping costs and offering “free” shipping. The customer’s “point, click and deliver” mentality is here to stay.

Amazon, with DCs in almost every state, can deliver to 44% or more of the US population in 4 hours or less. CEO Jeff Bezos says Prime members -- who get free 2 hour delivery on some products -- now exceed 100 million globally. It has become routine for millions of shoppers to buy commodity items like paper products, soft drinks, pet products, etc., avoiding trips to the store.

The cost of shipping and the time to get the package to the customer affects many customers’ decisions to buy from your business. As these trends continue, multiple distribution centers may be the best bet to reduce shipping costs and deliver faster to the customer. As an alternative to internally managing additional facilities, we recommend companies evaluate the use of 3PL as a major way to reduce start up investment and shorten the schedule. You may be able to reach 80% of your customers in 1-2 days via ground from two strategically placed centers.

However, multi-DC strategies are not the right strategy for every company because of the added expenses, inventory required and managing a second remote center. 

As Amazon gets stronger and companies become more competitive, e-commerce companies need to continually find ways to improve operations, reduce expenses, and at the same time improve customer service. At the heart of this is continuous process improvement.

As we perform operational assessments for multichannel retailers - while companies have similar functions and processes - they often end up with very different outcomes and costs per order. From the hundreds of practical blogs on our website, here are 13 major ways to make your fulfillment operation more efficient and links to detailed blogs for improvement.