NCOF Shipping and Handling Roundtable: Freight Analysis
Focused discussion groups and roundtables can make you aware of innovative ideas, provide feedback from your peers about issues or concepts you might want to explore, and spark your own thought processes. Curt Barry hosted a Shipping and Handling Roundtable at this year’s National Conference on Operations and Fulfillment, and here are a few of the ideas that surfaced.
Are you looking for a cost-saving idea? One distribution center partnered with a carrier and serves as a third-party shipping consolidator by receiving outbound packages from other fulfillment centers, running them through their shipping system, and gaining volume discounts on 3rd- and 4th-class mail.
Would the response to this question be beneficial to you? As the postal rate continues to rise, at what point does the increase negatively impact sales, and by how much?
Would multiple East-West United States facilities work for you? Would you benefit from reduced outbound freight costs? Would you benefit from potential savings by receiving Asian freight into a Western facility and reshipping to the Eastern location? Are you able to effectively manage and absorb the increase in inventory that naturally occurs with multiple facilities? Is your management team strong enough to control two facilities? How will you handle an item out of stock in one facility and in stock at the other? Multiple facilities are a tremendous opportunity with unique requirements for successful management.
Provided your vendor inbound freight compliance is good, manage the number of outbound packages by holding backorders for two or three days until you can ship complete, then upgrade the shipment for free and still potentially reduce costs while creating customer satisfaction.
Do you understand your outbound freight volume and the subsequent charges by your carriers? If you hope to negotiate your shipping contracts favorably, you must understand your business. Carriers are in the strongest bargaining position because they have all the information on your account. Your carrier should provide you with monthly reports of detailed activity so you can drill down to the average cost by package type. The carrier should also make available daily dashboards indicating your activity.
F. Curtis Barry & Co., a multichannel operations consulting company, focuses on the entire direct fulfillment process with expertise in distribution, shipping and handling, and freight analysis.
Tweet This 
Delicious 
Digg 
Facebook 
StumbleUpon
Related posts
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
