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If you are like thousands of other businesses around the world this year, you probably can check off at least one of the boxes below:

• We had to figure out how to do E-Commerce for the first time.
• We previously dabbled with E-Commerce, but suddenly had to get good at it.
• We’ve been doing E-Commerce for a while, but this year broke all our records.
• Our Returns Process is messy, expensive and hard to manage to customer expectations.

If you’ve checked off either of the first two boxes, you probably needed to check off the last box too.

Back in March when it became clear that we would be in for a very unpredictable year ahead, we were quick to point out that anyone who was not already good at E-Commerce would now need to be or disproportionately suffer from the slowdown in activity. Four months into the crisis, that seems more true than even we had considered.

Since 2020 has us rethinking EVERYTHING we were doing before, we wanted to make a quick share for you to start the week with a visual look at some basic Warehouse Design fundamentals. The events of the last few months have everyone wondering what the warehouse of the future will look like. But while doing updates to your CURRENT space to react to the new normal, how closely have you been adhering to the basics already?

We thought this infographic was a good representation of some of those basic pillars of good warehouse design. Let's start with the basics we use for planning. The one thing we'll highlight here is how often we hear that space management is the BIGGEST issue our client's are having. If you are exceeding the guidance below and using over 30% of your square footage for storage, it means you might be feeling crowded. Better rack utilization and building up may improve your sense of space!

Have you spent any time observing the activity on your dock recently? How do you feel about the way it works and the share of cost it takes in your operations? Are you tracking the cost? Well, given that nearly every operations facility is a “cost center” on your company’s P&L, you should be looking at your cost structure for each of our main “Process Areas” like Receiving, Picking, Packing, Shipping, etc. While there are a lot of factors that go into generating the cost model for each of your processes, two areas in particular - Receiving and Shipping - are particularly dependent on the design of your dock and the equipment deployed to support it.

Unless your facility is consistently recognized as a bleeding edge innovator and always staying two steps ahead of the rest of your industry, you’re probably like the rest of us and are hungry to know more about how your facility performs or compares to your competitors or others in your industry.

Photo by Franck V. on Unsplash

“Industry 4.0” is a term now in common use generally to describe the “fourth industrial revolution”, a term that it is used interchangeably with. But what does it mean, on a high level and specifically for what impact it might have on your business?

To get us all on the same page, let’s first go back to “Industry 1.0” and be clear about the other distinct eras of industrial revolution:

In October, Newcastle Systems’ own Kevin Ledversis was on a team of presenters in a webinar that dug into the challenges managers are facing with labor issues – sourcing, hiring, training and retaining in addition to things like performance and pay.  We’ve covered labor and staffing as a regular topic here over the years, and think the data that was assembled for this webinar is worth sharing widely.

It’s not in our culture here to talk about ourselves too much, nor our products. We especially don’t like talking about OTHER products because we like to think ours can speak for themselves. That’s why nearly everything we publish here in our blog and white papers are about the things we know that help our readers the most – things like process, automation, warehouse management, lean practices, and more. And we always enjoy the feedback we get year-to-year that tells us you want more content like that, especially in regards to process and measurement.

Theft from the supply chain is an old problem that even the newest facilities can’t entirely eliminate. A recent arrest in the Seattle area showed just how big a dent a small group of industrious thieves can make in even the biggest player in the industry.

The latest news from Newcastle Systems includes "No assembly required".  We have improved the delivery process by assembling the workstations in our manufacturing plant and packaging them for you to unpack in minutes. You can easily have the mobile workstation with portable power unpacked and rolling in minutes. We have assembly manuals, but soon they will become obsolete.