Drafting a site logistics plan is not just about keeping up appearances but is essential for effective planning and strategizing. A comprehensive logistics plan encompasses several levels of operational strategizing, including factors such as customer service levels, inventory, transportation, warehouse management, and decision making.
Strategic site logistics planning has three significant aspects, including long-term goals such as customer satisfaction and supply chain management, the means for achieving these long-term goals, and the process for achieving these long-term goals.
However, before you begin drafting your next site logistics plans, here are 6 points that are essential to consider for a proper site logistics strategy in 2022.
1. Maintain and Expand Your Inventory Management Strategies
Make plans to maintain inventory accuracy to a higher level to improve customer experience and internal communication. You can draft a system that updates your inventory count in real-time, ensuring that your customers cannot order products that are not in stock.
Real-time inventory management also helps you efficiently manage your warehouses as it will help you decide whether to increase the production of a product or reduce it.
2. Assess the Value of Your Third-Party Logistics Provider
The job of a third-party logistics provider is to offer solutions to warehousing, packaging, assembly, and distribution issues. By leaving order fulfillment to the experts, you can take quite a load off of your shoulders.
Your third-party logistics provider can integrate with existing e-commerce systems to manage your inventory, process returns and claims, optimize transit times, and much more. Therefore, when drafting a site logistics plan, ensure that your third-party logistics provider covers all the ground they can manage.
3. Promote Your Visibility
An essential part of any site logistics plan is increasing your supply chain visibility. In other words, utilize tools that help keep track of production, orders, and product shipments. This will give you a better idea of what is helping your process and what is hurting it.
4. Incorporate Scalable Processes into Your Logistics Strategy
During your site logistics planning, you should consider whether your processes can scale to meet periods of peak order volume, such as during the holiday season. While the increase in orders is excellent, it will only be of value if you can meet customer demand.
By drafting a logistics plan that helps you scale processes during peak order volume periods, you will increase cash flow while generating highly satisfied and loyal customers.
5. Weigh Your Costs Against Your Customer Experience
The process of order fulfilment, which is a huge part of site logistics drafting, needs to be centred on the customer within the parameters of the business’s marketing. Part of this process is to determine an order fulfilment budget.
Once you have an order fulfilment budget, consider how your increased order fulfilment costs impact the customer experience. This ensures that your firm doesn’t spend too much on a process that barely enhances the customer experience.
6. Upgrade Your Manual Systems to Automated Ones
There are several ways to automate the logistics process in today’s day and age. Deliveries can be tracked and monitored, thereby taking the guesswork out of supply chain planning. Fleet and inventory management software can automate many of your currently manual logistics processes, thereby refining your firm’s processes around the most critical factors.
Final Words
Drafting an appropriate site logistics plan that takes long-term goals, means, and relevant processes into account is essential for the ensured long-term growth of any business or firm.
Today, while many are reassessing the value of their third-party logistics provider, many others are integrating their systems with automated logistics processes to make the system more streamlined, efficient, and unbiased.
