Being a veteran of the warehouse industry throughout my career has given me a unique insight into many aspects of distribution interaction. It becomes most apparent when being personally on the customer side. Three recent online buying experiences highlighted different ways inaccuracies could occur in the warehouse. In each case, I was sure what had caused the mistake. And I had some specific thoughts on how they could fix the problem. Please follow along with me as I share the stories and solutions in part 1 of this two part blog series.
The first instance involved a seller on eBay—presumably a smaller seller, not a massive warehouse operation. I was trying to buy parts for my drone, specifically batteries. Somehow, rather than sending me the single battery I ordered, they sent me a charger, which I had already ordered from another website. Knowing warehousing and distribution, this is probably just a simple mispick, a smaller retailer with limited SKUs that are perhaps using paper picking or even just picking off the computer monitor, picking and packing things directly from a few shelves. So a simple mispick. When you have manual processes, you have these issues.
So, the total cost was not only all the return fees, but I had to buy that same battery from somebody else because they no longer had it available. That out-of-stock cost is hard to calculate because you often need to know what sales you didn’t make. Whether retail or warehousing, that opportunity cost can add up, especially if someone finds and buys from a new vendor. How many future parts might I have purchased from this vendor?
In the second instance, I did motorcycle maintenance and ordered several different things from vendors. One was a part I ordered from a website I buy from relatively often because of their availability, customer service, product research, and fast shipping. They carry a lot of SKUs since they carry parts for almost every type of motorcycle, plus all their gear and accessories.
When I received the part, it looked correct – labeled correctly with the right brand and motorcycle model – so I was reasonably confident I had the correct item. When I removed it from the package and
How do you minimize mistakes like this? As best practices go, we want to reduce mixed SKU slots as much as possible. It makes it tough on the picking process and slows productivity because they have to dig through a bin instead of just reaching and grabbing the right part. Mixed SKU slots cause further slowdowns throughout the day as everyone double-checks to make sure they grabbed the right thing?’ If your warehouse or distribution center is not big enough to support having a single slot for every SKU, add extra validation steps to minimize random errors and protect your bottom line.
The post Editor’s Choice: Warehouse Distribution Errors and How to Fix Them appeared first on Logistics Viewpoints.