The War on Warehouse Costs

THE WAR ON WAREHOUSE COSTS A survey of warehouse operators The research highlights several key areas in which companies are taking on this challenge such as making online ordering a smoother and more capable process from the back office, improving 'pick and pack' techniques, and reducing wastage within the warehouse. ? Overall, what are the main problems/challenges your business faces where you would most like to see significant improvement in the management of your warehouse processes? ? What proportion of orders do your customers now place with you online? Cost of running warehouse ops 43% Optimising stock levels 39% All 8% Accuracy of fulfilment 33% None 23% Managing returns A majority 14% 33% Integration between WMS & financials 30% Nearly half (43%) of business regard reducing the cost of running warehõuse operations as among their most critical challenges for business improvement Accuracy of inventory records 29% Efficiency of despatch 29% About half A minority 27% Speed of fulfilment 26% 28% Picking efficiency 24% Comms in the warehouse 24% Efficiency of order taking Nearly a quarter of businesses now receive most or all of their orders on-line, and almost 50% receive half or more of their business this way. 17% Do you need to process any orders as “pick and pack"? 64% of those surveyed said their pick and pack operations were growing – and among 3PLS'it is even' more significant No, but we have 2% formal plans to start doing this soon 15% 36% 25% 22% No, there are no Yes, it is a significant part of our business Yes, it is a small part of our business Yes, virtually all our business is now "pick and pack" firm plans to do this 17% claim pick and pack is 'easy' but a quarter described it as 'fiddly', nearly a third said it requires 'significant manual intervention', and almost 40% said it was time consuming'. How would you describe your experiences of the process of managing the "pick and pack" order process? Requires significant manual intervention Time consuming 31% Efficient process from order receipt to order despatch Managed by fully integrated IT from beginning to end 39% 29% 11% 15% 24% 17% Different IT systems involved don't communicate Fiddly with each other Easy Do you ever experience a situation where items in your warehouse need to be thrown away or sold off at a discount because they have been hanging around in the warehouse for too long? %3D - 6% Yes, this is a significant problem for us Yes, often Yes, sometimes Yes, but only rarely 13% 29% 31% No, never 22% access FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT ACCESS VISIT wwW.THEACCESSGROUP.COM/DELTA 1. . .