Logistics is the biggest influencer on your customer satisfaction ratings. If that seems like a blanket statement, then think of it from your customers’ perspective. Happiness is getting the product they ordered quickly or at least on time. Their opinion of your business is rapidly broadcast across social media and review sites. What they say influences potential customers and therefore the growth of your business. The tricky bit is balancing 5-star fulfilment with tightly controlled costs and efficiencies.

The results of a leaner and more resilient supply chain go far deeper than just cost savings. Speed of delivery to the customer is a differentiator, especially in consumer goods and online sales. So how can a supply chain consultant help achieve this desired outcome? What skills are involved?

Successfully growing your business sometimes means you outstrip your warehouse capacity. Optimising storage and rationalising stockholding is the first step to freeing up space. A new warehouse is the only option once all avenues have been exhausted. Ensure you choose wisely.

Available space inevitably gets used up under normal operating conditions. It’s almost a law of nature, just like Parkinson’s Law (work expands to fill the available time). Opportunistic bulk discount purchases, overstocking, old stock or just inefficiency eats up costly space. Suddenly you cannot add new lines that consumers are demanding. Your stock represents too much capital. Business is constrained by your warehouse capacity but expanding to an additional facility may not be feasible at this point. The only option is to increase storage space by better utilisation of what you have available. Where do you start?

The fact that Amazon was considering drones as a delivery channel highlights how important that giant considers retail supply chain management to be. That particular innovation focused on only one aspect of the process – speed of delivery to customers (at as low a cost as possible). Optimising the supply chain is not just about reducing costs. It also enhances competitiveness by making your proposition more attractive and winning market share. In the fiercely competitive retail and eCommerce space, winning often equates to faster and cheaper delivery. How well those costs are absorbed into product pricing depends on smart and proactive supply chain management.

As a logistics or warehouse manager, you appreciate that you have an expensive but critical facility at your command. Is there scope for improvement? Have you considered every avenue of exploration to realise even greater efficiencies, productivity and cost savings?

What tactics and processes do logistics consultants utilise to improve the efficiency of a client’s supply chain? And how can recommendations be implemented by a manager? While the end results are improved logistics planning processes, let’s examine how a typical consultant would approach the challenge of correctly identifying areas worthy of attention and improvement.

The normal approach to a skill shortage in a company is to hire someone or to train someone internally. This can be a challenge for many industries and business sectors to find people with the right skills, while training someone can take a significant amount of time. However, there may be an alternative, hiring someone or training someone is essentially having more of the same. This might be the most appropriate or possibly the only solution to some situations, but in others changing the processes, systems and methods employed within the warehouse or facility first might reduce or remove the skills shortage in the first place.

Black Friday however busy is just one day in your peak period. It might be the busiest day, it might be your peakiest peak but it is still one day and the responses you deploy to deal with one day or even a couple is not necessarily the responses you need to successfully negotiate and manage your whole peak period. However planning for peak will mean that Black Friday becomes a more “normal peak”.

As a warehouse professional you probably do not have much input into how marketing and sales work and generate the demand on your warehouse. This plan looks at the actions and areas within your control and areas where input from the rest of the business can help.

Industry 4.0, the so-called fourth industrial revolution, has already begun and is being rapidly adopted by leading companies. The reasons are simple – greater revenues and reduced costs through digital interconnectivity between machines, systems, processes and suppliers. The technologies involved can be daunting when viewed as a whole but, in any case, technology is only part of the story. Adapting appropriate mind-sets and processes must be progressed first before technology can be overlaid successfully.