If you’ve written off the use of FTL (full truckload) Freight in the past because your shipments aren’t large enough to use the full truck, you might be missing out on some of the lesser-known benefits of FTL Freight.
Regardless of what the focus of your business is, chances are your inventory is one of your biggest assets. Whether you sell your goods online or in a brick and mortar store, managing your inventory correctly is one of the main indicators of your business' long-term success. If your company relies on delivering consumer goods, you know that keeping your shelves stocked in an organized way to allow efficient retrieval and delivery is crucial to keeping your business afloat.
When it comes to manufacturing or just distributing any large number of consumer goods, some small businesses believe all they need is a fleet of trucks and trailers to ensure their products make it where they need to be. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality, there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes in order to make sure trailers make it from the staging area to the docks then out to delivery and back in a timely, organized fashioned with all the correct assets. This complicated process is known as yard management and it’s an imperative part of any business that requires trailer movement.
When you are making sure your products get from A to B, you may have been thinking about how you track the shipment once it is on the road and making sure that you know when it arrives, more than you may have been thinking about how it enters into the supply chain. The more efficiently your yard is run, the more swiftly those deliveries are going to get out, and the happier your drivers and those workers loading the vehicles are going to be. The happier you are going to be. Yard management is the key.
As well as the traditional warehousing services that people have required from their warehousing partners, there are a whole host of services that allow for product customization and compliance needs that are now being offered. Choosing the right value-added services can really help companies to reduce the footprint of their finished goods across their whole inventory.
Storage Solutions: You need to have a reliable way to store your products, and that doesn’t just include keeping them safe; it also means that you need to be able to know where things are, be able to move them easily to where they need to go, and the storage needs to be scalable to your needs.
Sorting is a vital part of warehouse management, one that takes part very early in your supply chain. If it works well, a lot of things are simpler to manage, and if it doesn’t it can cause a whole host of problems.
The control of your warehouse and the inventory contained in it is an essential part of your business. When it is running well you will see great results, and when it is running badly the reverse is obviously true. We look at how inventory control can be a key component in this part of your operation.
If you are at a point where your company is starting to expand, and you want to scale up your capacity to store more stock and get that stock more easily distributed, working with a 3PL company can really help you scale quickly, without over-reaching your budget. If you ever need to scale back, you can. With all of the value-added services that also come with warehousing now, 3PL can be the best solution for really helping your company grow.
