The good, the bad, and the perishable
Consumers goods encompass a broad range of products, but they can ultimately be sorted into two broad categories: perishable, and non-perishable.
Non-perishable goods are subject to the same kinds of challenges found across all ecommerce channels but can be unique in the particulars of the product. Electronics, for example, may require unique labelling requirements if batteries are included in the package, and oversized items such as furniture can require custom conveyance and sortation.
Perishable goods, on the other hand, are best exemplified by a single industry: E-grocery. Here more than anywhere, speed of order processing is paramount, because the products have limited shelf-life. Pack areas dealing with groceries call for a higher level of precision, temperature-controlled environments, and smaller order sizes than traditional grocery shopping.
Mistakes happen, but they don’t have to…
Given the high number of touchpoints that take place, the pack area is prone to many mistakes. This challenge is exasperated by the nature of consumer good distribution, which often calls for high volume throughput on orders with very specific contents.
Customer disputes and cost of errors can be severe. For example, consider an instance where a standard packing error costs a company $50. Even with relatively low error rates (e.g. 0.1%), a distribution center shipping an average of 10,000 packages a day can easily be incurring hundreds of thousands of dollars in error costs a year, and this example ignores the more difficult to quantify reputational damages caused by packing and shipping errors.
These kinds of situations are easily solved with automated scanning, tracking & tracing, product verification software, and conveyor reject lanes, which allows you to catch and remedy costly errors before they leave the warehouse.
Featured Case Study
A greeting card company needed to increase their order throughput from their warehouse to manage their seasonal demand.
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