Improving your logistics process will enhance your business. If you want to know how to improve your logistics, you have to understand what it is in the first place. Many people think that the supply chain and logistics are the same, but they aren’t. The supply chain is in charge of transforming raw material into a product and getting it to customers. Logistics is the movement of materials within the supply chain.
It has different functions, which include transportation, warehousing, third or fourth party logistics, and reverse logistics. Like supply chain management, logistics management aims to provide high customer satisfaction. There are many ways to achieve this. Here’s how:
Planning is key
Planning and strategizing is essential to logistics. When it comes to logistics, you have to plan ahead of time and also prepare contingency plans. This will save you time during the actual delivery and helps you handle problems — if you encounter any — smoother and with ease.
Transportation efficiency
Identify the best delivery routes. These are usually the ones that are safest and get you to your customers in the least amount of time. It would help if you also thought about the mode of transportation. Think about the vehicles you use. Are they the most efficient vehicles to get the highest customer satisfaction?
Take a curtain slider truck, for example. This will allow you to transport packages more efficiently than a standard truck would. How so? Since the truck opens from every side and not just the back, you can easily access the items. It’s especially useful when you’re delivering larger items as well.
Warehouse location
Where your warehouses are located is very important to logistics. As mentioned earlier, strategizing is critical. A good strategy would be to place your warehouses nearer to specific markets. This can help make transportation more efficient as well. Also, knowing what kind of warehouses you need to best store certain types of packages is essential.
Avoid placing the wrong kinds of goods in the wrong warehouse. If you handle products with chemicals, it’s probably best not to mix it with food products. If you’re handling dairy, you have to ensure that your warehouse has the right conditions to store it. Think about the size of your warehouses as well.
Making use of technology
We are living in a digital age. There is technology for everything nowadays. It’s easy to find logistics software on the internet. So why not take advantage of the technology that is being made available to you. They were made to make our lives easier by lessening the amount of manual interference and giving you more accurate data to manage your logistics. Installing automation systems that track and monitor your deliveries, GPS, or bar-code systems, for example. This will save you tons of time than if you were to track deliveries yourself.
Prioritizing your people
You can rely on technology, but your most vital asset is your people. They are not merely your employees or your partners; they are what hold your business together. Prioritize your people as you would prioritize a customer. You have to know how to collaborate, communicate, and have good interpersonal skills in general. Ensuring that the people you work with are being respected and that your employees are getting the proper training will also ensure the success of your company.
Conducting regular inspections
You should regularly inspect your facilities, equipment, forklifts, vehicles, containers, and inventory. This is important not just to ensure that everything is where it’s meant to be, but also to see if you meet proper safety standards. Make sure to inspect your equipment, especially forklifts, every month.
According to the OSHA forklifts cause about 85 fatal accidents per year, 34,900 accidents cause serious injury, and 61,800 accidents are classified as non-serious. Inspect your vehicles at least once a year to ensure that they are working at peak performance and if it needs any repairs.
Learning from your mistakes
A great way to plan and strategize your logistics process is by learning from your mistakes. By merely taking a look at what you’ve done before that didn’t work out, you get a better idea of what not to do and what you should be doing instead. Learning from your mistakes is a great way to avoid making more mistakes in the future.
If you want to improve your logistics process, you should keep these things in mind. Logistics is part of our everyday lives. Everything we own has gone through the process of logistics. It is only with the proper logistics management that these things get to us in the first place.
