7 Tips to Optimize Your Warehouse Process – for Online Sellers
When you work hard to scale up your e-commerce business, inefficient warehousing can lead to disaster. Shipping mistakes, unrecorded inventory, and lost/damaged goods can ruin your margins.
Here are 7 steps to increase warehousing efficiency:
- Allot specific locations for your product makes it easy to find the items you need. This reduces time spent in putting away stock when it arrives and processing orders.
TIPS –
- Keep small items together to avoid losing them.
- Place old inventory at the front of shelves/ racks or at the top of stacks.
- Store fast moving goods at the front of your storage facility/ room.
- Store heavier and slow moving goods at the back of your storage facility/ room.
- Group similar goods together.
“Optimise labor efficiency: Analyse your material usage patterns, and store high-volume items together near the front of the warehouse to eliminate travel time. Also, the store items that are frequently sold together near one another. Basically, you will streamline operations if you try to keep the items you pick most often in the most accessible locations” pointed Shashank Tarun, senior strategic account manager at Browntape, the Multi-channel order and inventory management firm.
- Conduct quality checks (QC)
Conduct quality checks to ensure that your goods are intact and delivered safely to customers.
TIP– Set up QC station just before the product packaging station.
- Track entry and dispatch of goods
It is always best to use an automated system to keep track of goods entering and leaving the warehouse. Especially true when products have different demand on multiple marketplaces and there is a returns problem.
TIP– Warehouse management system is a software application that assists with effective warehouse and distribution management.
- Review products regularly
Check sales details (which products sell quickest, when this happens, etc.). Accordingly, decide stock quantities.
TIP– Tarun mentioned, “Maintain Lean Inventory/Adopting lean inventory: stocking only what is needed, and nothing more. Possibly reduce or eliminate safety stocks, and try to get suppliers to deliver smaller quantities more frequently.”
- Note peak/slack patterns
Optimising staff is imperative to reduce expense and meet marketplace SLAs. Identify the peak/ slack periods will help you strategize well.
TIP– A staff calendar can help immensely.
- Store only the packaging you need
Determine the kind of packaging material you need and maintain enough to match the quantity of products in stock. Try to cut down the size of packing- it will save you valuable resources.
TIP– Measure your products down to size to minimize packaging. Purchase less packaging for the goods that are not in season.
- Warehouse location
Try to pick a location that’s easy for marketplace courier to reach. Try to keep your stocks at warehousing facilities in appropriate locations or shops that you can team with for a certain fee.
TIP– Couriers can pick up stocks from the stores/ shops you partner with.
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