Warehouse Efficiency & Ship From Home Tips & Guidelines
Tuesday, December 8, 2020Eric Zegarski
Optimizing Your Warehouse Efficiency and Shipping From Home Tips
1. Optimize Your Warehouse & At Home Storage
As your business grows, your storage and warehousing needs change. Therefore, it's important to audit your current storage needs and consider the following improvements:
- Running out of floor space? Consider utilizing vertical storage units.
- Compress your storage, have different sized bins for larger and smaller pieces of inventory.
- Look at your product grouping, make sure popular and complimentary products are near each other.
- Maximize your space and get rid of clutter. This not only allows your team to more around more freely, it limits the possibility of injury.
- Ensure your warehouse layout is up to date. This will allow your warehouse employees to find product with ease. Consider having a near real-time digitally accessible layout
- As your processes change, make sure to have regular training sessions. This ensures that everyone is on the same page with up to date practices.
2. Build Your Warehousing Software Stack
Having the right software solutions in your corner help with doing all the "heavy lifting" regarding order data. Whether at home or in a warehouse, software can help you optimize your shipping process. Your software stack should help you with the following:
- Order Management
- Inventory Management
- Label Printing
- Order Picking
- SKU Management
- Barcode scanning and tracking
3. Stockpile on Shipping & Packing Essentials
Running out of shipping essentials can slow down your fulfillment process and even bring it to a standstill. Make sure you have safety stock of the following items:
- Boxes and envelopes – most common sizes
- Packing peanuts
- Tape
- Labels
- Product packaging bags
- Any branded assets
4. Map Out Your Fulfillment Process
Whether you're fulfilling from your home or a warehouse, mapping out your fulfillment process can help you save valuable time and avoid confusion and delay. Here are the benefits of mapping out your fulfillment process:
- Identify easy reach places to keep emergency inventory of essential fulfillment supplies.
- Insight into crafting ideal workstations for packaging.
- Discover ideal placement of different workstations.
- Create the ideal flow to bridge accessing products and packaging.
5. Proper Inventory Management
You can have the most organized warehouse and streamlined packaging process, but if you don't track your inventory properly chaos will ensue. Here are a few ways you can track your inventory properly and avoid stock-outs:
- Take advantage of automatic data entry software.
- Barcode every piece of inventory for scanning.
- Automatically sequence order cadences with software.
- Use an ERP that meets the needs of your business.
- Use information labels alongside SKUs.
The following 3 items can assist with strengthening your warehouse efficiencies:
- ShipStation
- An ERP solution that meets the needs of your business. Discover the telltale signs that your business has outgrown its ERP.
- An integrated commerce network powered by eBridge. Discover the benefits of integration for eCommerce businesses. BONUS: Meme Edition
eBridge Makes Integration Easy for Your Business
Our integration solution is universal! You can add or remove systems with ease as your business grows and your needs change. Our integration platform has pre-built connectors for leading eCommerce platforms, ERP solutions, and 100s of EDI trading partners. As a result, we can implement an integration solution in a timely manner.
In addition, eBridge is hosted on Microsoft Azure, therefore ensuring an almost 99.9% uptime and industry leading security. With an integration solution from eBridge, you can ensure that your commerce network is connected and communicating data bi-directionally.