Don’t Let your Warehouse Run Dry

This year has forced so many companies to work on how to cut costs.  The Pandemic ruined much our the American Economy and what we found out was that it was all for a lie.  The fact is that lie or not we have to survive or we all lose our jobs.  I am always amazed at how much some departments can spend on certain items and it hurts my mind and pocketbook. It really is a wild ride of budgets and sometimes the individual items that are needed can really get costly.  This year beyond most our company is really cracking down on budgets to make sure we are staying competitive in this COVID-19 world.  It means that all of our sections especially our warehouse and shipping department need to be in tip-top shape and saving all the money we can to be on top of our competition.  If we can spend 20 cents less on each and every package we send out then we will crush the competition.  Anyone excited about that, to me it means getting down to each and every detail from how we put things together and every product used to ship a single package.  So that was our task this month was to cut our warehouse and shipping costs even more and we succeeded.

Money matters and it means we get to keep another employee.  I think that knowing how to do a project is half the battle.  Then you can take that process and narrow down the best, fastest, and most efficient way to do it.  When it came to simply ship out boxes we saved thousands a year by one single step we changed.  IT was an insanely tedious task and we had each of our floor workers help us do it.  We asked 5 different people to do the same job and do it alone.  We had them time themselves and asked them to simply take a shipment and fulfill it.  We watched the steps they made, the products they used, and how much.  We measured everything we could think of and even how many inches of packing tape they used.  What we found was that each and every person used 2 to 5 strips for each and every side of the box.  

They used too much packing tape because they knew that they had seen boxes open up with that tape and only one strip used.  It was clearly something that was just known by the workers and they all used excessive amounts of tape.  Not only did it look bad but it took a lot of tapes to do.  This was the biggest takeaway from watching them work and listening to why they did what they did.  This led me to talk to our shipping supplies company about it. 

We saved money by finding out how much tape we were wasting.  I called up a shipping supplies company and found out a fix for our failures.  We switched to gum tape and within a day we cut down on time to ship and cost. The entry barrier was a gum tape dispensure.  We made up the cost of that in 2 days.  Every day after was profit and that is how you compete in this world.