Do you have any of these 8 common symptoms in your DC?

How do we know that you (your DC that is) may be suffering from some of the above symptoms.
Note, that we said "symptoms". Hence, the root cause is somewhere else.

As our economy (the US) is trying to come out of the 'ditch', we have new issues to worry about.

1.  The distribution channel mix is not what it used to be.

2.  Facebook is now used for individual product promotion.

3.  Product proliferation (and hence SKU growth) is at full speed to grab the attention of the shopper.

4.  Major distributors -like Wal Mart, Target are taking away sales from the traditional Grocery distributors.

5.  Best Buy ( and before that Circuit city ) stores are being used as Show rooms and people eventually buy from Amazon and other on-line distributors.

6.  A major Food distributor like Supervalu, after years of buying up many competing chains, announces that it is 'FOR SALE".

7.  Some of the Wal-Mart shoppers are switching to Dollar Stores.

What is a Warehouse Operator to do?

If you examined your layout, operations just last month, it is time to do it again.

We help DC's by Profiling the Inventory and Customer orders, every week.
And we keep making incremental slotting changes based on that.

Optimum vs Flexible designs

An optimum design sounds good. That it will yield the lowest cost of operations. But 
such an optimum design is based on 'today's conditions' and 'our best guess on what tomorrow will bring. If those assumptions do not materialize, then the 'optimum' design will start costing more. And after sometime, it will begin to have major operational problems also.

A flexible design on the other hand, may cost few dollars more, but will continue to weather many unknowns in our marketplace.

Here is a graphic that explains the difference between optimum and flexible designs.

Thank you for reading this BLOG.