9 Warehousing Strategies To Increase Your Bottom Line

Posted on September 16, 2020

warehousing strategies

You know that warehousing works best when it makes the most of everyone’s time and resources. The last thing anyone wants is a product that sits in a warehouse longer than it needs to. Worse yet is the item that gets lost in the shuffle of logistics.

Good warehouse strategies optimize operations so products move through the warehouse as quickly as clients need, reducing overall costs, making the most of capacity, and ensuring quality public warehouse services.

At Quality Warehouse & Distribution, we understand that our clients rely on our warehousing strategies and how these align with their business strategy. We are client-focused, optimizing our logistics to support customer demand. And we pass our cost savings along as much as we can. With a public warehouse, we have the opportunity, skillset, and experience to provide an efficient warehousing solution for each client.

Warehouse labor is one of the top expenses of any operation. Still, around 3,000 working hours are lost each year because of poor operations plans. If you’re looking for warehousing strategies that will increase your bottom line, take a look at these 9 tactics that will improve your profits.

1. Use Sales Forecasts

One of the most impactful warehousing strategies to include in your planning is to use sales data to coordinate your team. Look at both past and future projections to get a sense of how many orders will come in at any given time.

This allows you to schedule your employees more efficiently throughout the week. Doing this in advance of each quarter gives you time to see potential setbacks before they happen and formulate a plan. If you have a warehouse with heavy volume, this strategy is a must to keep your team on track and ready to respond to potential problems.

2. Estimate Your Expenses

It’s possible to increase your bottom line by simply reducing expenses. But without taking a long, hard look at what you need month-to-month, you won’t be able to be proactive about your warehousing strategies.

For example, if past sales activity shows there’s a lull in dock activity the last week of every month, this is an opportunity to reduce costs in labor and equipment.

3. Automate

Automation is one of the best warehousing strategies you can use to make your team more efficient. The type of automation you use is based on where you need operations or analytics support to make sure the information you’re acting from is accurate.

Bad data entry and reporting waste companies time and money each year. Make sure the technology you choose includes the features that make sense for the needs of your day-to-day operations.

Too much technology can actually be a distraction for your team. Find that balance between state of the art features and simplicity so your team makes an easy transition into using the new system.

4. Choose the Right Location

Labor is the driving force of many warehouses. Make sure you choose a location that gives you access to the best available talent for your warehousing needs.

It’s unlikely that hourly staff will commute across long distances for jobs they can get closer to home. A competitive employer finds a location in reasonable proximity to its workforce when feasible but not directly in the area of other businesses that might take away your talent.

5. Evict Old Inventory

Unless you’re selling long term storage space, inventory that doesn’t sell is costing you money. Space is a premium in any warehouse and should be treated like gold.

Get rid of inventory that takes too long to move or doesn’t move at all. The space the inventory takes up is an opportunity for additional profit for your company.

warehousing strategy6. Centralizing Warehouses

A popular warehousing strategy, this is a change from the smaller, regional approach to warehousing. Instead of many small decentralized warehouses, companies are seeing the value of a larger facility that serves the same customer base. Why? Well, if you consider what goes into warehouse facilities — transportation, staffing, security, climate control, lighting, etc. — it is often less expensive to maintain a single large facility than many smaller ones.

The result of this warehousing strategy is more affordable warehousing. In turn, this means more cost-efficient logistics for customers. We operate one warehouse, centrally located for your convenience.

7. Outsourcing To Third Parties

We’re a third-party logistics provider, so we understand this warehousing strategy particularly well! Companies who had previously warehoused their own inventory are outsourcing to reputable companies like our own, as a lower-cost alternative that doesn’t sacrifice on quality.

Ours is a public warehouse, attractive to companies wanting to outsource by renting space for their needs, like emergency storage or temporary storage. It’s also great for smaller businesses with less inventory, or companies that need seasonal warehousing.

When organizations outsource to third parties like us, other logistics services follow. These include freight transport, rail shipping and receiving, container delivery and, import export logistics. This works well for clients who want full-service logistics on an as-needed basis at an affordable rate.

8. Electronic Monitoring Systems

Gone are the days of relying on security patrols to ensure that warehoused inventory is safe. While security staff continues to play an important role in warehousing, today’s warehousing strategies focus on technological solutions.

This type of system deters theft, internal and external. It reduces the number of people who need to have access to assets, while also protecting them from damage. An electronic monitoring system is ideal for theft prevention, but it also works well to monitor for fire, flooding, and other natural disasters.

This means two things for you as the customer. First, you can rest assured that your products are safe in our public warehouse. Second, there’s no need to pay more for security staff nor to pay artificially inflated prices thanks to the loss of products. Labor costs will always add to overall expenses, and in this case, it’s a cost easily controlled through tech. We provide secure, safe warehousing at an affordable price.

9. Lean Warehouse Operations

Overall, all of these warehousing strategies point to one main practice, which is lean operations. By optimizing the resources at our fingertips, we reduce the time it takes to:

We manage customer specifications and needs so that we can reduce the time and expense required to get your products where they need to go. We base everything we do on a lean, flexible model and we can adapt to your needs, responding quickly with an affordable solution. Our aim is always efficiency.

Working with Quality Warehouse & Distribution

Not every one of the best warehousing strategies requires you to upgrade equipment or make a heavy investment in new software. Much of strategizing is thinking and planning ahead based on the information you have available. Your profits rest on your ability to keep your employees working efficiently while maximizing your space.

Quality Warehouse & Distribution has over 40 years of combined experience in logistics, including warehousing and warehousing strategies. Our warehouse in Edison, New Jersey, offers over 300,000 square feet of space, 24-foot ceilings, 32 loading docks, a full sprinkler system, and an electronic monitoring system.

To learn more about what we do or to take advantage of our proven warehousing strategies, call 732-476-3151 or send us an email at info@qualitywarehouse.com. If you know what you need and you want to know what we mean when we say affordable, you can receive a fast quote by using our online form.

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