A newly released forecast anticipates that retail e-commerce will account for nearly $2tr in worldwide sales this year - and will more than double by 2020.
The wholesale distribution (WSD) market is huge. At $4.8tr in annual revenues, WSD industry revenues are nearly 100 percent more than sales of consumer packaged goods, and slightly greater than U.S. retail sales revenues.
Most conversations about distributor efficiency center around process - the logistics, staging, workflow and equipment that carry the heavy load to get the job done. Most facility managers don't think of lighting as playing much of a role in overall efficiency. For those whose facilities are full of antiquated HID fixtures, lighting is probably considered more of a nuisance and costly maintenance expense.
In just a few short years, the wholesale industry has witnessed the start of a shift from the classic, "siloed" ERP solutions of the past to modern, "integrated" ERP solutions.
Scan-based trading (SBT) is often thought of as a process solely for larger big box retailers. This business model transitions the relationship with suppliers from purchased inventory to vendor-managed inventory, with the checkout scan data serving as the channel to pay for the goods to the distributor. The data collected from the transactions is then delivered to the distributor, as a form of a receipt.
Quite often, even among well-run businesses, the actual costs of inventory are inaccurate, underestimated and incomplete. While most resellers know they have dead inventory, many are unaware of just how much. Studies show that in even well-run companies, anywhere from 20 to 30 percent of inventory is dead or obsolete.
While not as prevalent today as in the past, there has been tension between group purchasing organizations (GPOs) and distributors over the years. A good deal of the tension was the result of a misunderstanding as to the roles each plays in the supply chain. For instance, many distributors believed - and may still believe - that they are in competition with GPOs.
No two companies are alike, and their ERP systems shouldn't be either. Manufacturing and distribution, in particular, have unique, and uniquely complex, processes and workflows that require functionality a vanilla ERP application can't provide.
While this past winter was fairly mild compared to the winter of 2015 - which began with New York officials shutting down a 132-mile stretch of the New York Thruway due to freezing and snow falling as fast as six inches an hour - supply chain managers still need to be prepared to handle extreme weather.
The transportation and warehousing industry suffered more than 95,000 industrial accidents and illnesses in 2014, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor. That works out to 225 per 10,000 workers - one of the highest rates of any industry. Most estimates put the annual cost of workplace injuries at more than $50bn, so it makes sense from a business as well as a moral point of view to make safety a priority. The following are some proven ways to increase safety.
