Practical Guide to Scaling your Warehouse

The do’s and don’ts

The truth is that many companies simply aren’t prepared for the warehousing challenges facing them as they scale up. Every single one of these brands will have different needs, will face different pressures and will need to think about how to correctly play their hand to make investments in technology, materials, staffing and warehousing space that will truly stand the test of time as their businesses continue to grow. There is no single growth model that works, universally, for all businesses. Each business will face challenges that the majority of others won’t, sell products that a lot of other companies don’t and will be performing tasks that many others simply can’t. There is no universal roadmap.

But there are things that you can do, at any stage of your business’ growth, to make sure that you can easily cope with the stresses of rapid growth. Focusing on just one element of scaling – the e-commerce warehouse – this guide will take you through the four main considerations that all consumer goods brands need to have at the forefront of their minds. Drawing from almost a decade of experience helping some of the world’s fastest-growing consumer goods companies to scale their operations, this paper will show you how to achieve and maintain perfect service levels. Understand the fundamentals, establish the perfect warehouse layout, buy appropriate storage, streamline your processes and invest in the right technology. Growth is both a marathon and a sprint: when you create flow in your warehouse, you’ll be able to scale your business with control, confidence and absolute focus. This guide will give you the focus that you need to eliminate warehouse chaos.

Introduction

Your company depends on growth. It needs more sales, more customers and more profit in order to get out of survival mode and truly flourish. When you can see that the number of consumers invested in your products and brand is increasing every day, it’s an incredible feeling. You’re succeeding. But if your growth is preventing you from shipping every order on time, without fail, you’re going to run into problems.

Get the fundamentals right

Before exploring ways to navigate scaling during the ‘Initial upsizing’ and ‘Major scaling’ stages, we’re going to give you the fundamentals that all businesses should keep in mind at every stage of their growth. Here’s a checklist that can be used to make sure that you’re on the right track:

• Product files matter: No matter what you’re selling, you need to assign unique SKUs to each product. If, for example, you have a dress in 10 colours that comes in 8 different sizes then each one needs a unique SKU code. Start early in order to save yourself a major headache later.

• Put barcodes on products: Even if your processes don’t initially require barcodes, they might well do in the future. And if that happens, not having barcodes already on the products will prove to be a time-consuming endeavour.

• Staffing: When you start out, you want your first warehouse employee to be someone who you can see developing into a future supervisor or warehouse manager. Find someone whose skills can grow at the same pace as your business.

• Contracts: Be careful with your warehouse staff contracts. When you move, you might not be able to find an appropriate new space. Reach a solution by inserting a clause about how far they could expect to commute in the future. This level of clarity and transparency will help to soften any potential issues down the road.

Initial upsizing

When you make the first big move in growing your brand and increasing your stock holding, you will suddenly find yourself confronted with problems that you wouldn’t have experienced before. You’ll need to start thinking about organizing your warehouse in a more efficient way. You’re going to have to start moving away from using manual methods. You’ll need to make decisions about how you’re going to store your products and you’re going to have to nail down the best warehousing processes to help your growing business to improve efficiency.

Do’s and don’ts

Do:

• Plan for peak: consider using off-site bulk storage to supplement your warehouse’s available space.
• Allocate enough space for packing and despatch.

Don’t:

• Pick a warehouse where half of the space is out of reach to pickers. Forget about your product: you will benefit from having your most popular products immediately accessible.

Major scaling

When you see the numbers of orders being processed in your warehouse jump from the hundreds to the thousands, you may see that some of your previously sturdy technology, storage and processes start to show some cracks. This is the point when retailers might decide to break away from their all-in-one e-commerce platform and invest in a more robust ERP. It’s the stage that the cost of investing in some automation really starts to make sense.

Improving your approach to layouts

Moving into a new, bigger space doesn’t mean that you’re cleaning your slate. Carry over all of the lessons that you learned in your previous warehouses. This includes not falling into the temptation to stack all of your pallets up to the ceiling, especially when accessibility is one of the key criteria of a truly effective warehouse space.

Focus on finding robust, specialist storage

When you make a big move to a large warehouse, bring over all of the lessons that you learned about storage from your previous spaces. The problems that you’ll face will be similar, only bigger. So any problems that have been hounding you will suddenly become far bigger.

Establish completely seamless workflows

Moving to a bigger space will expose some process gaps that will need to be plugged. A bigger warehouse means that your staff will need to move around more; have your picking workflows been adjusted to reflect this?

Scaling your warehouse - 4 key takeaways

1. Engineer a layout that works for your business.
2. Buy in some specialist storage.
3. Establish which processes make everything run smoother.
4. Make sure that you are supported by the relevant technology.

"The most positive impact the Peoplevox WMS Solution has had on our business is the fact that we have been able to scale to where we are and will be able to keep growing without the need to change." Jamie Blundell, Owner, SkateHut

For more information on warehouse management solutions, you can visit Peoplevox.