It’s official!

UK consumers spent £3.3 billion online from Black Friday to Cyber Monday. On Amazon alone, there were 86 items sold per second, making it the biggest ever sales day in the UK/it’s biggest ever sales day in the UK. Curry”s reportedly had 400,000 visitors per hour to its site during peak trading. There is no denying it, more and more customers prefer to shop online. By the end of 2015, the global e-commerce industry will have experienced a 13.9% growth, its biggest since 2011.

But the ‘magic’ of shopping online can only occur due to a stable and established supply chain. From manufacturing, assembly, distribution, picking, packing, more distribution, the average chain is quite complex. Seamless online shopping and delivery is only possible if a supply chain is efficient and established. The modern supply chain has been described as the lifeblood of many organisations and nations.

In retail, logistics professionals are constantly tasked with ways to optimize their growing eCommerce fulfilment operations. Some of their challenges include an ever increasing stock base, slow moving inventory, compressed order cycles, products with different handling types, customized orders etc. It is essential that there are no foul-ups at any point in the supply chain. Any untoward incidents can have a knock-on effect on every other aspect.

Distribution centres and warehouses are regarded as key parts of any supply chain. They provide temporary storage of both raw materials, and finished products. Thus, their managers are constantly on the lookout for ways to make them more efficient.

While we can’t offer much advice on what to do with slow moving SKUs, we can give you our top tips for optimizing your current space. Trust us, it’s not as full as you think:

Perception vs. Reality: To develop any optimization plan, first assess how your warehouse is currently being operated. The warehouse may seem like it chugging along nicely, but assessing processes will often reveal inefficiencies.

One example is the famous phrase uttered by managers “I’m out of space.” No, you’re not. It’s in our nature as humans to fill up empty spaces. By assessing your current operation, you’ll soon change your tune to “I’m out of locations.” Finding these hidden locations can be done manually or with a warehouse management system.

Location is Everything: By now, you should know the fast moving SKUs and those that spend ages on your shelves. By simply altering their locations, you can save pickers hours of walking time. 30 seconds extra isn’t much when examined in isolation, but an accumulation of those extra 30 seconds, per picker, per trip, will add up at the end of the day.

Slotting helps you get rid of this time-wasting by storing similar types of SKUs together. This means pickers pick more accurately and in less time, thus increasing throughput.

The Right type of Storage: Choosing the right storage for each product type will improve processes and optimise the warehouse. Because traditional pallet racking is easily configurable, many warehouses use it in a variety of ways and systems. But its versatility doesn’t mean it should be used in every conceivable situation.

Choosing the best storage requires an analysis of the stock the warehouse carries, the available storage and coming up with a way to integrate them efficiently. Using traditional racking to store palletised goods may seem efficient. However, if the pallets are carrying boxes of small individual items, it’s no longer as efficient. If a picker has to fish for small items from the boxes on a pallet, that whole storage system is flawed. A better option would be a flow pallet rack, carrying smaller boxes/trays containing the individual items.

Having incorrect shelving and slowing down the delivery process, by even one minute, may seem like a small cog in the supply chain, but every second adds up. By using these ‘simple’ tips, warehouses can improve their efficiency and gain more profits. With the rest of the holiday season, and the prospect of handling returns in the New Year, we advice distribution centres to continuously fine-tune their processes.

Monarch Limited is a leading distributor of all types of warehouse storage equipment. Dealing in new and refurbished systems, we help our clients make their operations as efficient as humanly possible. For more information on which type of racking can help your business, please contact us.