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Peak season creep is no joke. According to the National Retail Foundation, over half of the consumers are well underway with their holiday shopping in early November, and many much sooner. As seasonal shopping preferences shift, warehouse preparation must react in kind, prompting the question of how soon is too soon to get ready for that peak season rush.

Ramping up your operations with the expectation of more activity is one thing. But what about changing your warehouse processes or making some upgrades? Would these types of changes benefit your operations or give you one more headache that you’ll have to manage in the coming months?

It may seem odd to think about the holiday season during the heat of summer. But anyone working in retail or order fulfillment knows that the busy season is just around the corner. And those who are best prepared for the holiday rush and the logistical challenges it presents can reap the greatest rewards.

One warehouse process that we don’t see discussed as frequently as we’d expect would be Quality Control (QC). While the need for QC for the products coming into the warehouse varies by industry or types of products, it tends to be overlooked in many of those places where you would expect to see it.

If any of the following scenarios applies to what you do in your facility, then read on, this could be something that helps:

• You sell products are received directly from 3rd party manufacturing partners
• You have products that have a traditionally high return rate
• You have products that have high price points and are kept in secure storage

There are other scenarios that apply as well, but let’s prioritize covering these more common ones:

What are reverse logistics? How do they affect your supply chain? What can you do to leverage reverse logistics and improve your bottom line?

Read more to find out how the return of goods can actually create potential profit for your company. Learn how to measure and assess your company’s reverse logistics system. Find out some of the benefits that come with a good reverse logistics workflow.

“Quality is Everyone’s Responsibility”

Edward Deming, considered to be a “God” in the eyes of the Japanese business community for his influence on their manufacturing sector after WWII is attributed as the source of the now somewhat obvious quote above. His philosophy was one that wanted us to see manufacturing as a “system,” not a series of bits and pieces of additive work.

Warehouse receiving operations are a critical part in maintaining the integrity of inventory systems and ensuring the availability of products for customers. Without an effective receiving system, items fall through the cracks, are not counted, do not receive adequate inspection, and fail to provide evidence of problems with vendors that affect profitability.

How does your labeling process work for your facility after expanding it to support your e-commerce business? Unlike the simpler processes of shipping out pallets and totes to a retail location or distribution partner which lives on the common 4x6 label, e-commerce shipments of individual bags or cartons being shipped to residential addresses can come with a very different level of complexity.

While the standard 4x6 stock label may still be the best option for many of your shipments, it’s worth a look at some of the other considerations to take into account to ensure that your labels are not the weak link in ensuring that your distribution center is not a source of lower customer satisfaction.

With the huge jump in facilities supporting Ecommerce from last year, the hiccups stemming from building the new capability in operations that were new to it are still ongoing. Individual vs. case shipping, single-item picking, and returns are some of the processes that have taken on a higher level of complexity and created difficult challenges for many facilities. Today we’ll spend a few minutes on one of the most visible, difficult and costly of those “new” processes – Returns.

We regularly cover many of the core processes that a warehouse or production line work to optimize every day, with a particular focus on how to measure and improve them. While “labeling” is a key part or outcome in many of these processes, it’s generally not referred to as its own “process”.

UPDATE: On Monday, March 29th, 2021, the Ever Given was freed and continued its journey northward, allowing for the passage of over 360 ships that had impacted about 15% of the entire world's container capacity. Bon Voyage!

Last week was the beginning of one of those rare weeks when you could tune into your daily news broadcast and hear your usual news readers interviewing supply chain analysts, shipping company representatives and logistics experts almost every day – a group of professional profiles that you almost never see on the national news!