Tag: warehousing

Reasons Why You Should Outsource E-fulfillment

There are many reasons why a company should outsource its e-fulfillment. While some reasons are obvious and easy to understand, such as many companies do not pay any attention to the benefits of outsourcing its fulfillment services, some are comparatively not so obvious reasons and are hard to understand.

Why You Should Outsource E-fulfillment

The process of receiving orders from your web store, and shipping them to customers around the world is termed as E-fulfillment, and these are the obvious reasons you should outsource E-fulfillment.

Lack of capital:

Many Startups and established companies do not have the capital to rent a warehouse, hire employees, lease a forklift, pay for insurance, and any other charges. In such cases using Third Party Logistics companies to handle the fulfillment services is the only way to go.

Faster Turn-Around time:

When you are selling products online, in order to succeed in the e-Commerce business you need to ship fast. Customers these days don’t want to wait for an additional day or two to receive their products. Most “fulfillment centers” have enough staff to ensure that the orders leave as quickly as possible, something you might not be able to do if you have limited resources.

Focusing on your own business:

A company needs to focus on its core abilities whether it’s selling or developing new products. That is why several companies outsource their order fulfillment services. It is just wiser to worry about sales than receiving, warehousing, shipping, and inventory shortages.

Flexibility:

Companies that are selling online can choose the Third Party Logistics Company and the location to ship from. They can also have multiple locations to ship from without the haste of renting the space at any of these locations.

Not so obvious reasons why you should outsource E- Fulfillment.
While obvious reasons are easy to understand and can be seen easily, there are some reasons which shouldn’t be overlooked.

Lower shipping rates:

3PL companies usually have higher benefits as they have high shipping volumes which qualifies them for larger discounts and much lower rates than if you try or ship on your own. This applies to all forms of shipping such as Inland Transportation, or even Ocean freight.

Expertise:

While the company must focus on newcomers, they should also have people who are working in the fulfillment centers for many years, it can be really helpful and you cannot put a price on experience.

Cross-Selling:

Through working with the fulfillment company you get to meet potential clients.

Global reach:

If you are planning on exporting your products, you should go for 3PL’s as many of these companies are freight forwarders.

Value-added services:

Fulfillment centers can help with branding and marketing in addition to other services such as collections and receivables management.
According to a study by the Harvard Business School, it is better and efficient to use a fulfillment company instead of doing the fulfillment yourself.

How Tenaxx Logistics Can Help?

If your company is seeking a partner for third party warehousing and e-commerce fulfillment services, Tenaxx Logistics is the right place for you. With over 1 million square feet of warehouse space, effective costs, flexible agreement, and modern tools and software, it’s the ideal warehousing partner for the company of all sizes.

Why Public Warehouse Space Is Better Than Private

Public Warehouse and Private Warehouse

If you need a warehouse business for your growing business, you’ll have two options to choose from- public warehousing or private warehousing. There are some advantages and disadvantages that come along with each option, but most of the business consider public warehouses as better options than a private warehouse. Here are just a few of the things that make public warehouses the right choice.

Here are 4 reasons to consider a public warehouse for your company’s storage needs:

1. No Capital Investment is needed in Public Warehousing.

When a company or business chooses to operate a private warehouse, it requires an outlay of capital to purchase, upgrade, and maintain the property. Additionally, safety equipment, storage racks, forklifts, and a myriad of other things must be purchased to operate smoothly.

Contrarily, a public warehouse has all of the infrastructure, equipment, and employees in place. There is no capital investment required, which means money will not be diverted away from other essential aspects of your business.

2. No Property Tax For Tenants Of A Public Warehouse

Property taxes are a huge expense for companies that own large warehouses. Failure to pay taxes on time results in fines and penalties, further increasing the cost. In tough financial times, that kind of liability can cause serious problems that may be difficult, or impossible, to recover from.

On the other hand, there are no property tax liabilities with public warehouse space for the tenants. Those costs are the sole responsibility of the warehouse provider.

3. Public Warehousing Offers Greater Flexibility

Owning a private warehouse restricts your company’s ability to relocate should the need arise. It can take a great deal of time and effort to sell a privately held warehouse facility, find a new location, and build to suit your needs.

However, public warehousing offers a great deal of flexibility since typical lease agreements only require a 30 or 60-day notice before moving. In addition, expanding into a new territory or geographic location can be facilitated with ease by utilizing other public warehouse space.

4. Public Warehouses Offer Value-added Services

If you’re the owner and operator of a private warehouse, inventory control, sorting, packaging, shipping, and receiving are all up to your company to manage. Employees must be hired, trained, and supervised in order to assure quality and compliance.

Most public warehouse facilities offer these types of services as part of the lease agreement. It’s like having an entire staff of dedicated employees that you don’t have to put on the payroll. In addition, third-party providers are able to offer lower rates for other logistics services such as transportation.

Consider Tenaxx Logistics For All Your Company Warehousing Needs

Before you invest in a private warehouse for your company’s storage needs, take a moment to consider what you’ve read here. For most companies, operating a private warehouse is expensive and restrictive, which makes growth slow and difficult.

Public warehouse space, on the other hand, is cost-effective and flexible, allowing your company to grow faster and easier. If you are considering storing your products in a public warehouse, look no further than Tenaxx Logistics. Since 1966, Tenaxx has been a fixture in public warehousing. Give our team of experts a call today.

An Ultimate Guide to Plan Your Warehouse

Warehouse planning and implementation should be as efficient as possible to compete in the daily growing market. Fundamentals of warehouse layout designs are such that it accounts for the efficiency of operations, from stocking and refilling to order fulfillment, your warehouse design can either streamline your business processes or can slow it down. The following tips on how to plan your warehouse can help you achieve more efficiency, which can help you grow your business.

1.Define and Understand the objectives.

Objectives can be defined depending on the business such as to reduce cost and providing maximum customer services. Some need more inventory while some need more pick and packing. However, your objective must be such that it can be acted upon immediately.

2.Requirements.

Stocking and fulfillments are two of the major tasks that can either eliminate your burden or does the exact opposite. Once you get an understanding of what’s happening inside your warehouse you can organize items according to requirements, more frequently ordered products must be kept near the exit door so it gets easy to pack and pack them. Stocking must be greater than the demand to meet the supply.

3.Traffic Flow.

How great is the traffic, determines the design of the warehouse, if a warehouse with less traffic is built, it doesn’t need a large space and many employees while a place with great traffic will require much more space and employees. Traffic flow also controls the stocking and shipping from the warehouse, more traffic means more demand which needs greater space.

4.Space

How to utilize space, with a fixed length and width of your warehouse try to stack things vertically rather than organizing things horizontally. Keep similar things together and always have room for overstocking if occur, with some parts of the warehouse dedicated to office and some to working areas and empty pallet storage utilization of available space is done to increase the efficiency of the warehouse.

5.Implementation Plan

The focus should be on creating a clean and accurate warehouse, there is always a room for improvement, so Detail every step forward to create your warehouse layout design, Allocating suitable resources to tasks and projects in the plan. Checking what can be done to improve the design and when finished double-check everything.

6.What to do after planning?

Start implementing and try to manage inventory, a well planned and designed warehouse will surely help increase your efficiency and taking inventory management into factor you can deal with overstocking and stockouts. A planned warehouse will help you reduce pick, pack and shipping time and will eliminate any extra space and utilized it for other purposes.

How Tenaxx Logistics Can Help You

To know more about warehouse space utilization and optimizing your entire supply chain, go to Tenaxx Logistics and give us a call to find out which solution is right for you.

Tips to Manage Inventory for Multiple Warehouses

With great power comes great responsibility similar is the scenario with great business, a great business poses a number of challenges, inventory being one of them with multiple warehouses. Multiple warehouses are not just for multinational businesses but it is done to cover area geographically, some might have a smaller business and still have multiple warehouses, it helps to grow the business throughout the country.

Here are some tips about how you can manage multiple warehouses and get the best out of it.

Overstocking

Using effective management skills can be the boost that your warehouse requires. Inventories must be planned considering minimum level, maximum level, consumption rate at warehouses and turnover, Inventories must be planned considering these factors and an enlightened system will eliminate errors and it also ensures that warehouses have enough supply to meet their demands.

By considering geography as the main factor

While setting a new warehouse not taking geography into account will be a big blow. Look at consumption trough sales data and find out the regions and cities with a high aggregate of customers, factors such as rent cost and transport cost and the no. workers will vary while deciding the area for the warehouse. The area with a smaller population will have less consumption so no. of workers will be less but not the same case for the area with a larger population as they will need more workers, the transport cost will be less and the area required for the warehouse will be much more.

Warehouse layout

There’s always room for improvement, the process of packing and picking takes up most time which ends up making customers unhappy and even lost sales, an unorganized warehouse can confuse workers, while an organized one will eliminate the extra time for picking and packing. Warehouses must always be optimized for efficiency, which in turn is logical and easy for employees to navigate. Popular products must be kept near the exit door so employees can quickly send these orders out.

Using Secure and movable tracking options.

Mispicks happens when customers get the wrong item, this leads to nothing but wastage of time and labor, word gets around which is not good for the company’s reputation. A tracking option adds the trust that the right product will be delivered to customers, and also adds the feature of changing the destination with just a click. By tracking warehouse assets, destinations can be managed and assigned easily.

Keeping up with customer’s demand.

The best way to fulfill your stock levels is to identify what customer’s demand is at the moment and ensuring that the warehouse holds enough products to meet demands. Safety stock must be the minimum requirement and additional quantity will be according to the consumption of the product.

Little extra efforts.

Analyze the processes that can be done to cut personal costs and time for pick, pack and shipping and restocking the item. Always keep a similar team for product’s picking to restocking as they will have an idea about where they can find stuff, who to pack, why they have to ship and how to restock. This will not only save time but will be more efficient.

What more?

Managing multiple warehouses need a plan for working effectively, the plan must ensure that stocks must be available and don’t run out of supply. Customers are always the priority so make sure that the wrong item and damaged items do not get shipped, Effective skills are critical to managing and running an efficient business.

Tenaxx Logistics

If you’re looking for warehousing services, look no further than Tenaxx Logistics. We have the space, services, modern equipment, and commitment to customer satisfaction needed to make your transition to the world of warehousing a smooth one. To know more about our warehousing services, contact us today.

Key Stages of Order Fulfillment Process

Order fulfillment is an important part of the supply chain process. It is the process of receiving, processing, and shipping orders to the end customers. It’s possible to handle fulfillment in-house or outsourcing it to a third party logistics company that handles the process for you.
To maintain quality control and maximize profit as much as possible, many smaller operations opt to handle their own order fulfillment process. But if you want to focus more on the main fields of activity, and work more efficiently and productively, opting third-party logistics is the best solution. The order fulfillment process varies according to the type of business, inventory management, and supplier selection and can become highly complex. Here are mentioned the key stages of the order fulfillment process:

Receiving Stage

When you receive inventory from suppliers and manufacturers at your warehouse. the next steps will be:

1. Count all the items which you have ordered.
2. Check to make sure no items have been damaged during shipment.
3. Add the record of new inventory to your warehouse management software to keep the count, sales numbers for each item and also to track the location of items.
4. Add SKUs/barcodes to every item you received if they aren’t already labeled correctly.
5. Place individual items into ready-to-deliver kit packages, if necessary.

After following all these steps carefully, the next stage is to shelve it in the warehouse. By properly storing the items in the warehouse, you can maximize the speed and accuracy of your order fulfillment process thus can increase warehouse productivity.
Store each SKU in its own box, with overflow stored in another area of the warehouse. Keep SKUs that sell most often in boxes closer to the packing stations for easier access.

Processing Phase

The order processing phase starts when an order is received from the customer. Typically, fulfillment software integrates with shopping cart software so that when someone places an order online, the order is automatically sent to your fulfillment software at your warehouse, too.
After receiving the order, items are picked by staff and taken to an order packing area. In the packing area, firstly the items are checked for quality and packaged with the best materials appropriate for the items. Packing slips and other information are added, then the box is sealed and moved to the shipping station.

Delivery Phase

Once the order is in the shipping station, it’s ready for delivery to the end customer. In the shipping station, the package is weighed and the best delivery method is selected. Once the package is ready to deliver, the shipping station will update the status of an order to make sure customers can track their orders until they are delivered. After the order has been delivered to the customer, it can be considered fulfilled.

Choose Tenaxx Logistics for Your Order Fulfillment Services?

Want to find out more about our order fulfillment services? Contact Tenaxx Logistics today by filling out our online form or call us at 519-260-2738 and let us know what your business requirement. We’ll talk to you about possible shipping requirements and give you an accurate estimate for the services you need.

5 Ways to Optimize Your Pick and Pack Process

The picking and packing process is an important part of the order fulfillment process. By optimizing the overall pick and pack system, you can streamline your order fulfillment, gain customer trust, and increase your business profits.

Here are given 5 ways to optimize the pick and pack process:

Utilize your Warehouse Space Effectively

The items should be placed according to the order requirement. By designing your warehouse for efficiently storing and picking of items, you can save the time it takes to gather items for your orders. The arrangement of items should be done carefully such as always place top-selling items near the packing stations, store items right next to each other which are commonly packed together.

Keep Your Warehouse Well-Ordered

By keeping your warehouse area clean and well ordered you can make pick and process easy and fast. Ensure that the items your packers staff needs for orders are arranged correctly around the workstation. Always place the items from receiving inventory in the same place to avoid wastage of time in searching for items.

Use WMS for Tracking Items

Use a warehouse management system (WMS) to keep the record of items that are listed in the order and to find them easily. By using advanced warehouse management software you can save lots of time in it takes in finding and keeping the record of the items for orders.

Try Different Order Picking Methods:

Try different order picking methods such as zone picking in which each order picker is assigned a particular zone and will do order picking within this zone only, or batch picking where the assigned picker picks multiple orders simultaneously.

Ensure your Inventory is Up To Date

An optimized pick and pack process always depend on the accurate inventory system. Always ensure that your inventory is up to date for easily keeping the records of the items and to track them easily. Check for items that are out of stock and place the orders of those items for avoiding delay in the order fulfillment process.

Bottom Line:

Your pick and pack process is only one important part of running a warehouse efficiently. With the help of up to date inventory management system, you can optimize your pick, pack, and shipping process and increase your business profits by maximizing warehouse productivity and gain customer trust.

If that’s what you want in your business, we are here to help you.

What are the Risks Related to Cross Docking?

What is Cross Docking?

Cross-docking is an order fulfillment strategy where products from a supplier or manufacturing unit are shipped directly to a customer or retail chain without any need for mid storage of goods in the warehouse. It is a process of receiving products through an inbound dock and then transferring them across the dock to the outbound transportation dock. It consists of trucks and dock doors in inbound and outbound sides with minimal storage space. The process starts when inbound products are arrived through transportation such as trucks/trailers and are assigned to receiving dock on one side of the cross dock terminal. The goods are sorted and screened to identify their end destinations and moved to the other end of cross dock terminal with the help of a forklift, pallet truck, and any other transportation medium. After completing the loading of goods at the outbound dock, the products delivered to the end customers.

Major Risks Related to Cross Docking

1. Implementing the cross-docking strategy in the warehouse required capital investment. This can translate into a warehouse redesign to save space for a conditioning area and/or the adoption or designing of a warehouse management system to assist with cross-docking tasks.
2. Cross-docking fully relies on a team to transfer items from inbound to the outbound dock, organizations need to be trustworthy of their suppliers’ ability to deliver the right products in right condition on time to the cross-docking terminal.
3. A number of Transport Carriers needed to take full benefits of the cross-docking system. A sufficient number of transport carriers will be needed for the delivery of goods. Since the operation is mainly dependant on trucking, there is an increased cost, need for parking space for trucks in the warehouse, and need for enough docks to implement the system.
4. It requires time for proper planning and execution: without coordination between supply and demand and proper planning, cross-docking is not suggested in the warehouse. Therefore, in the global computation, cross-docking should save enough time to cover its application in operational planning.

Need Help with cross docking?

If you want to know more about cross-docking and how Tenaxx Logistics can help your business contact us today!

Advantages of Using Public Warehouse

What Is Public Warehouse?

A public warehouse offers you the best solution for all your temporary storage of goods on a short or long-term basis. A public warehouse provides short or long-term storage to companies on a monthly basis. Public warehouse fees can be taken together as storage fees and inbound and outbound transaction fees. A public warehouse can charge per pallet or charge for each square foot that is used by a company for storing their products.

Public Warehouse Is a Complete Package

1. The public warehouse not only provides storage space to a company, but also offers other services such as inventory management, physical inventory counts, and shipping functionality. The public warehouse charges its clients for a certain rate for the goods stored, the area of the warehouse used and the services the client wishes to use.

2. The company using the public warehouse does not have to hire warehouse staff, does not require any inventory software or warehouse equipment. The public warehouse provides a complete package of a dedicated workforce, inventory control software, picking and, packing facility and charges their clients accordingly.

3. Most companies use the public warehouse for the short-term, but it can often lead to a long-term relationship as companies been familiar with the convenience of the public warehouse services. Companies that own and operate public warehouses invest significantly in modern equipment to remain competitive. They offer clients increasing levels of flexibility in order to retain and attract more clients.

Conclusion

An optimized supply chain is one that delivers orders to its customer at the right time – and does that by spending as little amount as possible. If you can’t afford your own warehouse, a public warehouse may be one solution for your storage needs.