Offering merchandise from drop ship vendors has greatly extended the assortment of many e-commerce and omnichannel brands. Many e-commerce businesses do not have internal fulfillment and drop ship 100% of their assortment. The challenge for the retailer is to maintain high customer service standards and vendor compliance with the drop ship partner.

Two Mystery Shopping Experiences

Recently, we mystery-shopped two of America’s largest merchants, each of which have tens of thousands of SKUs. This experience illustrates key customer service criteria you should assess in your business.

In omnichannel and ecommerce companies, inventory management, including tracking and reserving inventory for orders, is crucial for maximizing sales and improving customer satisfaction. If you can’t give customers accurate product availability, status, immediate delivery and store pickup, you’ll probably lose the sale and the relationship.

Inventory management systems and processes are dispersed throughout the business. It’s also difficult to analyze how to improve accuracy and timeliness. Without a total replacement, how can you incrementally improve systems and processes?

We will outline a 6-step process for assessing your inventory systems and developing an action plan for improvement.

Slotting is defined as the process of assigning SKUs to picking locations based on various criteria, such as unit sales velocities, size, weight, or family group - with the objective of improving operational costs, more efficient space use and customer service – and minimizing the replenishments.

There are sophisticated commercial software packages that assist with warehouse slotting planning and maintenance. However, many warehouse operations are not ready for a fully automated system, the capital investment or the continual maintenance required.

However, almost every warehouse can benefit from applying some basic slotting strategies and best practices. This blog outlines a slotting analysis that any warehouse can do to gain many of the benefits without acquiring a sophisticated slotting system.

Many people hear about robotics in the warehouse and they think it’s too futuristic. But, there are e-commerce fulfillment applications for robots installed in today’s facilities. They are not theoretical.

There are hundreds of competent third part fulfillment (3PL) facilities in operation today. Many have multiple facilities, which allows clients to be closer to the customer and save shipping costs. Additionally, private equity investors have acquired many major 3PL companies and consolidated them into 3PLs with dozens to hundreds of facilities. Many of these have specialized fulfillment for channels like DirectTV (DTV).

The biggest challenge you’ll face in relocating a warehouse is disruption to your business. If you are fully invested in inventory at an existing 3PL or your internal facility, how will you transfer inventory to start up the new facility without having to shut down for days or even weeks?

Planning and executing the move of a new ecommerce fulfillment center is a massive undertaking. Budgeting of one-time costs, start-up costs and on-going expenses is rigorous. This article demonstrates how we would approach a warehouse move, and as an example, how we collaborated with a client to develop their budget for opening a new facility and operating two facilities during the transition period. 

When a large information systems or technology project is proposed, we always get two immediate questions from management:

We recently worked on a project where the company, a Direct-to-Customer (DTC) e-commerce company, moved from third party fulfillment (3PL) to internal order fulfillment. This case underscores the considerations most DC transition teams will have to face and solve during a transition to internal order fulfillment. We expect it will help you think about the planning and start up challenges for your facility.

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