It’s time to improve your logistics business, but where do you start? Delivery processes are changing around the world, especially as the world gets more busy and richer, meaning more delivery and more ordering,
If you’re in fleet management and logistics, it’s vital that you review your logistics processes regularly to make sure you’re not working harder in areas that aren’t profitable, as well as making sure you’re not wasting time and money you are putting into your business and logistics. If you need some idea on how to improve the logistics side of your business, check out these seven tips below and improve your business today.
Improve The Layout Of Your Warehouse
Possibly the number one thing you can do to improve the logistics of your business is to improve your warehouse’s layout and stock placement with the help of warehouse management system. There are also some other ways to do this, and it should be something like ongoing review and collaboration with your team and your workforce. Having a poor layout will mean that pickers are constantly moving from one place to the next just to find things that should have been there in the first place. This is inefficient and will end up wasting time and costing you money. It could also mean that stock is placed in such a way that it ends up being dangerous.
Plan Better Delivery Routes
Delivery route planning is an essential part of logistics, no matter what you’re delivering. Planning better delivery routes will help your drivers to know where they’re going, when they’re going, and ensure that they don’t get stuck in tailbacks due to poor planning.
Planning better delivery routes have the added bonus of being able to organize your fleet too. There is no sense in having three of your delivery drivers turn up in the same neighborhood just because you didn’t plan efficiently. Planning properly will save your drivers time (thus speeding up the rest of your deliveries), and your business will also be able to save on the extra CO2, which is a great piece of PR for your marketing team!
Get A Picking Strategy In Place
How do your pickers pick the stock and products? Is it automated, are they just handed out sheets as and when they turn up, is the sheet in order or at least in sections? These are important considerations for your business because shaving off time is also saving money; more time saved means more time for the next project and no need to hire an extra person.
When planning your picking sheets, be sure to consider where the stock is. If your business is in food delivery, for example, you may want to consider grouping things together like meat, fish, poultry, etc. You also need to consider the skill of your packers and how fast they work. If you have a picker who is particularly fast, they may be able to handle bigger picks, whereas a picker who is quite slow should be given smaller picks.
Consider Automating As Much As Possible
Automation is quickly changing the way we do things, and none more so than in the logistics and packing industries. Although we’re not quite at the point of giving up on human beings altogether, having robots doing some of the heavy lifting, the picking, and the organizing can really take the burden off of your human team and lead to better fleet management overall.
When considering whether to go down the automation route, look at your business thoroughly. Automation and robotics can be very expensive to install, and you should really discover whether or not they will actually save you money in the long term when thinking about the repairs and breakdown aspect of automation, as well as the margin for error.
Have Goals For your Team
A team without goals is like a rudderless boat afloat in the sea; you’re going nowhere fast and likely to sink. Set goals for your team to ensure they know what they’re working for and that you get the best out of them. It’s not worth setting goals without getting some benchmarks in place first. You must set realistic goals along with the proper data and analytics from both your own business to date and the industry at large.
When setting goals and communicating these with your team, do it with some motivation rather than barking orders!
Review your Standard Operating Procedures Regularly
Your standard operating procedures (SOPs) will help you to make better decisions throughout your business and to keep everyone safe. Just because they’re “standard,” though, it doesn’t mean they will work all of the time and work the most effectively and efficiently.
Take the time at whatever regular intervals work for your business (monthly, weekly, yearly, etc.) to review these procedures and make sure they’re still working for your business and not causing any bottlenecks of wasted time and energy.
Plan Ahead For Busy Times
Businesses go through busy periods and quiet periods. That’s just the way life is, but if you haven’t planned ahead for these times, then you are the one missing out and wasting your business’s money along the way.
Most busy times can be forecast in advance. For example, if you are in the consumer retail industry, then Christmas will be a big-time of year for you. Likewise, if you’re in the food industry, you’re likely to see a boom at special times of the year, such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter.
Of course, some busy periods can’t be accounted for, and we saw that with the recent pandemic hitting gardening and DIY industries particularly hard because suddenly everyone was at home with nothing to do except gardening and DIY. So try to plan as well in advance as possible, use computer modeling and data from both your previous years’ movements and your industry as a whole to show you when the busy times are, and then you should have extra resources available to help keep things moving smoothly.
No comments:
Post a Comment