The future of... Supply Chain Management

Dear friends,

High season in logistics is already ramping up for weeks now. As every year as in every season there are bottlenecks. Year-in-year-out they remain.

An industry so dominated by IT and High-Tech as e-commerce, it is fascinating nobody dares to innovate, think big. Immediate reply: extreme low margins. Transport costs are too high, lack of driver capacity, you know the echo.

We can innovate on It level, have a speed by light data interchange and perfect order rates in the webshops, introduce high speed machines, robotics, yet fulfillment and distribution operate at different speeds.

I think we all have seen these giant Warehouse-blocks?

Many municipalities restrict building these centers for various reasons. Reason to go for mathematical precision to store the goods as close to the customer and reduce the size of these buildings. (Optimization algorithms)

What is stunning about these centers, the many loading doors. Hundreds for the largest ones.

Can we improve this?

Looking for high speed, high volume examples, yes, regional postal centers. (Please be flexible in your thinking, we know a package is not like an envelope, it is about the principle behind it)

At a regional post center, mail is collected- unsorted.

There are not that many machines in there to sort the post for a complete country.

These machines have all the letters, stacked on one side, there are a number of shutes where they are sorted and drop in.

Sorting will be done in different batches.

First, all letters are sorted in counties

Secondly, the letters are taken out the shutes per county,

Thirdly, the county letters are sorted again

Fourth, the final sorting is done on zip code and house number.

Ready for the postman to do his/her round.

Back to the fulfillment centers with packages,

....kilometers of transport and sorting belts are installed inside that only do 1 sorting.

The other sorting is done in regional centers and eventually a local hub.

In documentaries, we see that drivers are waiting at the fulfilment centers are waiting in line till they get a signal to load their small trucks.

Problem:

This is in most cases not sorted on street level and house number like the postman/woman requires.

There is a waiting time for loading, not triggered by the volume or the finish of sorting. It is organized by a strict transportplan like public transport.

we nee as many loading doors as there are regional centers.

The regional centers repeat the sorting until route level, not by volume.

Customer centricity?- Yes there is an express lane too- but who can see what the customer expects regarding delivery time?

Can you see opportunities?

• To save building space
• To save handling
• To save transport kilometers
• To save energy
• To improve delivery time
• To reduce stress for the workers and deliverers
• To improve your experience as a customer?

Please let me know which ideas you have for improvement.

Wish you a happy shopping experience, and remember, giving makes at least 2 persons happy

Cheers,

Abraham