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Every kid in America,

Liked Christmas a LOT,

The warehouse team,
Who had to manage peak every year,
DID NOT!

It could be their heads weren’t screwed on right,
It could be, perhaps, their shoes were too tight!

With the disruptions in supply chains all over the world making headlines in mainstream news channels, it’s a good time to revisit some basics on Supply Chain Planning (SPC) given that we now see a lot of businesses being forced to devote a lot more attention to this critical skill area than they may have before – because they did not have to.

Humans have been benefitting from vaccines for over two centuries. But the process for developing and distributing vaccines effectively has been neither neat nor direct. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage across the country, the sense of urgency for a solution has never been greater. 

Holiday season, or “peak season” as it’s known in the industry, is a part of the annual “rhythm of the business” in the warehouse and logistics industry. In the US, it’s generally seen as encompassing the last four months of the year, and accounts for about 60% of all retail sales for the entire year. So there is never any doubt about the importance, the stress and the rewards involved in planning and executing for success every year.

Newcastle Systems will serve as a local drop-off site for Toys for Tots.

If you would like to contribute, you can drop off new, unwrapped toys in our collection box now through December 10, 2020. 

Drop Off Location
Newcastle Systems, Inc.
73 Ward Hill Avenue
Haverhill, MA 01835 USA
9:00 AM - 5:00 PM

If you would prefer to donate 

a toy virtually, you can do so here:
https://toysfortotsbox.com/

As we have learned from managing the Ecommerce boom in 2020, the adrenalin of ramping up adequately to get hundreds – or thousands – of shipments out every day also has a “hangover” feeling that comes from the Returns process.

How has your business responded to the rapid changes in the distribution and logistics industry this year? Chances are that the rapid evolution of your processes and how you supported them are not just a band-aid for making it through to 2021, but the blueprint for your current and future facilities well beyond this crisis and into the future.

It’s hard to imagine during the heyday of lead acid batteries that anyone would have thought something called “Battery Day” could be seen as a futuristic, sleek, design-savvy symbol of innovation. But in case you missed it, yesterday September 22^nd was the annual Shareholder meeting for Tesla, an event they have branded as “Battery Day”, and is used as a showcase for new innovations, ideas and plans coming out of Tesla.

While no one needs to be reminded how much has been changing across our industry in 2020, it’s useful to keep looking into HOW things are evolving and learning about what everyone is doing differently as either a reaction to events, or to get ahead of them more pro-actively.

At Newcastle Systems, the large variety of industries over which we receive orders gives us an interesting vantage point from which we can see how things have evolved quite a bit this year. Today we thought it would be useful to share some of what we have been seeing and what we might expect because of it going into 2021. To be brief – you’ve been incredibly innovative and creative this year.

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.