With the growth in technology, demand for improved performance plus demand for year-on-year cuts in operating costs that help drive competitiveness means that the right specification, sourcing and management of your warehouse and distribution operations has become a complex process that is mission-critical to manufacturing and distribution.
Get the decisions and locations right and you can benefit from a smoothly efficient supply chain that minimises capital tied up in stock and delivers on the nail. Get them wrong and you can multiply your costs right the way from source to customer: and if you’re sourcing in Korea for end-users in Europe, then that’s going to hurt.
Multi-functional warehouses
The modern trend is for increasingly large, multi-functional warehouses. A decade ago, half a million square foot was the exception rather than the rule: today, it’s vice versa.
The increasing popularity of goods or components sourced in the Far East makes for longer initial lead times but also opens up opportunities for compressing the supply chain once they hit your plant or distribution centres. The likely long-term impact of this largely retailer-driven trend will be to push some warehousing back to the point of origin and reduce purchaser warehousing requirements.
That having been said, easily-customisable and high-rise warehousing in our sphere remains a crucial success factor - but with the added opportunity to decrease fixed stock holdings and simultaneously expand throughput by keeping it constantly moving through the supply chain. In short, being able to benefit from lower costs.
Expanding warehousing operations
Whether just starting or simply expanding your warehousing operations, getting it right is not just about size or availability. You need to match the needs of your business to the right kind of warehouse design in the right kind of place.
Do you need a storage and assembly operation or a ‘stockless’ cross-docking facility that ensures fast and high throughput for your finished goods? Do you run it in-house, work with a third party logistics (3PL) provider like TDG or outsource entirely through a fourth party provider (4PL) like Panalpina. Or should you consider a specialist lead logistics partner (LLP) to synchronise your sourcing, manufacturing and transportation operations?