zone? Recommendation: Work with what you have. When reducing transportation costs, take a holistic approach. Visibility into your network’s customer base and distribution capabilities is essential. Evaluate why you have a high average zone; if orders are not being shipped from the ideal location, determine whether this is an inventory or TMS issue. Shipping from store has become a common tool among retailers to reduce shipping zones. Eighty-four percent of GMT’s 2018 Benchmark Report retail respondents utilized or planned to utilize ship-from-store. Incorporating the entire retail network into the fulfilment process will be essential for competing in a next-day shipping market. 6. Work in Progress: Keeping too much inventory or works in progress in the system. Ask yourself: Is batching causing backups or delays in fulfillment? Are shipments ready to ship long before the cutoff time? Recommendation: Find a balance. Work in progress is a symptom of an unbalanced system. Longer queues
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result in longer fulfillment times. Map out your entire fulfillment process and identify where your backups are occurring. Alleviate stress in these areas. If orders are late due to spending a significant amount of time in a virtual or physical queue, consider upping fulfillment staffing or redistributing your workforce. If a large number of shipments are constantly staged for pick-up, consider increasing your carrier's pick-up frequency or changing the pick-up time. 7. Waiting: Delaying the next step in the process due to lack of resources. Ask yourself: Do I have the resources I need to fulfill an order? Recommendation: Share the wealth. Maintaining the minimum inventory levels to meet customer needs can be risky. However, an interconnected multi-DC system can minimize the impact of starvation. Understating customer volume by product type and region is essential for distributing volume and optimizing among DCs. In addition, treating all DCs and stores as a part of one interconnected inventory storage can mitigate the risk of low inventory.
Visibility in Your Supply Chain Any efficiency analysis or optimization initiative requires a comprehensive view of a shipper’s supply chain. As customer expectations rise, accurate and accessible parcel data is invaluable to shippers. Remaining in the dark about a network’s volume distributions or contract impacts is not an option for retailers wishing to gain a competitive edge. Ensuring your supply chain is interconnected and running smoothly requires taking a few steps back to evaluate the whole network and focus on opportunities.
Jessica Wurst is a Strategic Solutions Engineer at Green Mountain Technology (GMT), a Parcel Spend Management service provider for shippers with over 10 million parcels per year. Jessica has a Bachelor of Industrial and System Engineering from Auburn University and is a certified Lean Six Sigma Green Belt. Visit GreenMountainTechnology.com for more information.