Almost 25 years after the rise of warehouse management solutions to drive increased customer service levels, there still remain a significant number of Tier 1 distribution-intensive companies that continue to use manual processes to support a growing demand on the warehouse.
With today's fast-paced supply chain and rising consumer demand, it has become a best practice for warehouses to prepare and stage orders prior to the truck's arrival, typically up to 24 hours in advance. While this practice may seem like an effective method of fulfilling orders in a timely and accurate manner, it doesn't take into consideration the possibility that the truck is late, or worse, doesn’t show up at all.
Import cargo volume at the nation's major retail container ports is expected to increase 7.3 percent this month over the same time last year as retailers stock up for the busy back-to-school season, according to the monthly Global Port Tracker report released by the National Retail Federation and Hackett Associates.
A toxic mixture of overcapacity, weak demand and aggressive commercial pricing is threatening liner shipping industry profitability for the rest of 2015, according to the Container Forecaster report published by global shipping consultancy Drewry.
As we enter the second half of the year, performance figures for May from the industry's leading research firms are painting a rather dismal airfreight picture for the rest of 2015.
Warehouse personnel are adopting order fulfillment technologies, re-organization techniques, and picking optimization methods to create efficient operations to answer the growing demands of customers.