If you are having trouble and problems with your supply chain and manufacturing in your business, then I may be able to help. I am a super experienced plant manager who has seen a lot of different businesses come and go. It always seems to be the case that a company will be doing really well, then all of a sudden make drastic and unnecessary changes to either their supplier lineup, their supply chain management, inventory, or some sort of manufacturing process. I have seen it happen time after time and it never ceases to amaze me how naive some business professionals can be. Since I have years of experience working with and managing industrial supplying for manufacturing and production, I thought it would be appropriate to write this article to describe a few ways in which you can improve your supply management as well as your processing and shipping efficiencies.
The first thing you need to know when improving your warehouse shipping is that it may take some time to figure out what the problem is. This means that you may have to start measuring, analyzing, and controlling your shipping processes. It’s important to see what kind of output your business is reaching and what the warehouse is capable of. This will make more sense when you are trying to piece together different costs and overhead, and will ultimately lead to better decision making going forward. In the long run, identifying ways to improve is going to be extremely beneficial for your business, but there is no doubt that the process is never fun.
The next thing you are going to have to do is try to cut costs somewhere. I don’t mean just changing your supplier of shipping supplies or something like that. Sure, shipping supplies is important and a big cost, but we are looking at things much bigger. I’m talking about employing more technology throughout the entire plant or warehouse. Here’s the thing about technology - it is almost always better than what a human can do. To be honest, humans are not very impressive and will always fall short of certain benchmarks. That’s why we must replace all of our employees with robots. Will John not be able to buy his kids presents during the holiday season now because you replaced him with a robot? Maybe - but that’s not your problem. Your problem right now is cutting down warehouse costs, and this is one way to do it. Using robots is a lot more costly up front, but over time there is no doubt that they will pay off due to speed, efficiency, and lack of mistakes.
Another big shipping mistake I see a lot of companies make is not having a simple, standardized labeling system in place to ensure that every package is labeled accurately. When it’s all said and done, labeling should be the simplest and most routine function of your warehouse, and you should not have to go to great lengths to make sure your team in the labeling department is working effectively. Again, fire some people and replace them with robots if you have to. I know that, from personal experience, robots are almost always the way to go. In fact, the warehouse I work at does not employ a single person on the warehouse floor.
