Q. When you have my stock in your warehouse how can I be sure I will be paying as little as possible for the storage and not paying for one small box on a large pallet?
A. We would approach this in two ways, depending on the information you provide about how quickly your stock moves: a) fast moving items would be stored on pallets with a pallet Fixed Picking Location. This means we would only ever pick from one location, which would be a ground floor location. When this location is down to its Minimum Stock Level a replenishment order would automatically be generated instructing us to pick the next oldest pallet (First In First Out discipline) and place it in the Fixed Picking Location, This ensures that every location is utilised to its fullest. b) for slower moving items they should be managed within longer timescales and therefore moved to gradually smaller locations to suit the volume of stock. An example would be a pallet of 10000 items (representing 1 year’s worth of product) would start off as a standard pallet. After a pre-agreed fixed period we would transfer the stock to a smaller pallet which would be more cost effective to store. The final stage would be to transfer the stock to a binning location, which will again further reduce the storage costs. In its lifetime of 1 year it would be subjected to 2 or possibly 3 carefully managed moves which would significantly reduce the amount of storage costs for that item.
A. We would approach this in two ways, depending on the information you provide about how quickly your stock moves: a) fast moving items would be stored on pallets with a pallet Fixed Picking Location. This means we would only ever pick from one location, which would be a ground floor location. When this location is down to its Minimum Stock Level a replenishment order would automatically be generated instructing us to pick the next oldest pallet (First In First Out discipline) and place it in the Fixed Picking Location, This ensures that every location is utilised to its fullest. b) for slower moving items they should be managed within longer timescales and therefore moved to gradually smaller locations to suit the volume of stock. An example would be a pallet of 10000 items (representing 1 year’s worth of product) would start off as a standard pallet. After a pre-agreed fixed period we would transfer the stock to a smaller pallet which would be more cost effective to store. The final stage would be to transfer the stock to a binning location, which will again further reduce the storage costs. In its lifetime of 1 year it would be subjected to 2 or possibly 3 carefully managed moves which would significantly reduce the amount of storage costs for that item.
Q. Companies such as eBuyer are able to achieve next day delivery for orders placed as late as 8pm. Could my fulfilment provider achieve this?
A. They could indeed. I believe it is as simple as introducing a night shift and changing collection times of parcels. Whilst the principle is simple to put it into practice is a little more tricky. It is of course a volume based decision here. I expect that your fulfilment provider has a stable multi-client environment, if they are not 24hours already then this may be because the volumes from all clients are not sufficient to justify the labour intensive investment. Also from your point of view, overtime rates to accommodate the change may well affect your handling prices.
A. They could indeed. I believe it is as simple as introducing a night shift and changing collection times of parcels. Whilst the principle is simple to put it into practice is a little more tricky. It is of course a volume based decision here. I expect that your fulfilment provider has a stable multi-client environment, if they are not 24hours already then this may be because the volumes from all clients are not sufficient to justify the labour intensive investment. Also from your point of view, overtime rates to accommodate the change may well affect your handling prices.
Without wishing to sound negative at all, eBuyer achieve their late cut off because volumes and throughput justify the decision to place a night shift. In addition they are in a single client environment which makes this all the easier to facilitate. They are of course incentivised to achieve greater sales in order to sustain the volumes required to make this feasible.
Q. Can you provide a service that will take orders and cash payments (debit, credit cards only) on my behalf via the telephone as well as via the web?
A. Yes we can as we have an onsite core contact centre whose expertise has enabled us to undertake just this type of work for many of the leading charities (for example) within the UK .
