Warehouse Designing & Services
Warehouse Design must include the organization and distribution of space into different operational zones and storage rack areas. Generally, a central warehouse must consist of six sections: reception, quality control, adaptation of unit loads, storage, order preparation and dispatches. Usually, these six sections or departments can be grouped together into three areas: reception, storage and dispatches. These are explained below.
Reception Area
This area covers the receipt of goods, quality control and, where required due to the nature of the product or goods, the adaptation of unit loads.
The reception area must be adjacent to the unloading docks, and of an appropriate size to manage all goods that could arrive in the warehouse during a normal working day. If possible, there should be an additional area large enough to deal with any possible unscheduled increases in goods received.
If it is necessary to adapt received unit loads, the surface area must be increased and the resources required to carry out this task must be made available. This includes having the necessary personnel, suitable working benches and tools, reserving part of the storage space for empty packages and having a system to remove the original packaging.
Storage area
The design of the storage area will depend on whether or not orders will be prepared in the installation and whether this preparation will take place at the racking bays.
In a central warehouse, this area can be made up of one or more sections. Since the objective of this article is to provide the reader with as much information as possible about the different options, here it considers, for example, an installation that receives various types of products, in different quantities, with a number of different rotation ratios and with complicated storage requirements.
Dispatch area
This area contains both the order preparation department (with orders prepared on the ground or from racking units) and the dispatch department.
This is the area that must be used for the preparation and, where necessary, the packaging of orders received from the rest of the warehouses in the chain. To this end, it must have the right resources and no expense must be spared on these resources under any circumstances, since this is the part of the warehouse that has the greatest bearing on the company’s public image and reputation.
Supply Chain Management
Supply Chain Management can be defined as the management of flow of products and services, which begins from the origin of products and ends at the product’s consumption. It also comprises movement and storage of raw materials that are involved in work in progress, inventory and fully furnished goods.
Supply Chain Management Process
Plan
The initial stage of the supply chain process is the planning stage. We need to develop a plan or strategy in order to address how the products and services will satisfy the demands and necessities of the customers. In this stage, the planning should mainly focus on designing a strategy that yields maximum profit.
For managing all the resources required for designing products and providing services, a strategy has to be designed by the companies. Supply chain management mainly focuses on planning and developing a set of metrics.
Develop(Source)
After planning, the next step involves developing or sourcing. In this stage, we mainly concentrate on building a strong relationship with suppliers of the raw materials required for production. This involves not only identifying dependable suppliers but also determining different planning methods for shipping, delivery, and payment of the product.
Companies need to select suppliers to deliver the items and services they require to develop their product. So in this stage, the supply chain managers need to construct a set of pricing, delivery and payment processes with suppliers and also create the metrics for controlling and improving the relationships.
Make
The third step in the supply chain management process is the manufacturing or making of products that were demanded by the customer. In this stage, the products are designed, produced, tested, packaged, and synchronized for delivery.
Here, the task of the supply chain manager is to schedule all the activities required for manufacturing, testing, packaging and preparation for delivery. This stage is considered as the most metric-intensive unit of the supply chain, where firms can gauge the quality levels, production output and worker productivity.
Deliver
The fourth stage is the delivery stage. Here the products are delivered to the customer at the destined location by the supplier. This stage is basically the logistics phase, where customer orders are accepted and delivery of the goods is planned. The delivery stage is often referred as logistics, where firms collaborate for the receipt of orders from customers, establish a network of warehouses, pick carriers to deliver products to customers and set up an invoicing system to receive payments.
Return
The last and final stage of supply chain management is referred as the return. In the stage, defective or damaged goods are returned to the supplier by the customer. Here, the companies need to deal with customer queries and respond to their complaints etc.
This stage often tends to be a problematic section of the supply chain for many companies. The planners of supply chain need to discover a responsive and flexible network for accepting damaged, defective and extra products back from their customers and facilitating the return process for customers who have issues with delivered products.
