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How 5S in the Warehouse Can Increase Throughput and Reduce Waste
Early in Hiroyuki Hirano’s classic sourcebook on 5S methodology in warehouse operations and factories, 5 Pillars of the Visual Workplace, he introduces readers to the “red-tag” strategy for visualizing waste. The enemy, Hirano writes, is waste, and the red-tag strategy provides a visual metric for identifying accumulated waste on the factory and warehouse floors. As…
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3 Cold Chain Logistics Challenges—And How to Solve Them
Cold chain management has transformed to meet the growing global demand for fresh food and pharmaceuticals. This transformation has not always been easy, though: businesses running cold chain logistics operations often struggle to transport and store perishable food products while maintaining their safety and freshness. Pharmaceutical products such as vaccines are particularly prone to damage…
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Pallet Pooling, Supply Chain Sustainability Circular Economy, Supply Chain: Lowering Your Total Cost of BusinessReverse Logistics and Sustainability: Reducing Waste in the Supply Chain
Reverse logistics, or aftermarket logistics, describes an integral part of supply chain operations where materials and products must return to their point of origin for proper disposal or value recapturing. By integrating reverse logistics and sustainability, companies can reduce waste generated in the supply chain, lowering their carbon emissions and environmental footprint. This eventually improves…
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How to Lower Your Warehouse Carbon Emissions
As businesses introduce sustainable practices across their supply chains, operations managers have located a key pain point: carbon emission reductions. Logistics operations—including warehousing—contribute significantly to a business’s carbon footprint that can negatively impact both the brand and the bottom line. While warehouse carbon emissions are not as high as those generated by freight transportation, warehousing…
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Sustainability in the Grocery Industry: Why It Pays to Commit to Sustainable Practices
The well-stocked grocery store is a staple of modern life, with its uniform, colorful rows of canned, packaged, and fresh foods that stretch the long aisles. And while customers enjoy the abundance of grocery store offerings, they are also starting to pay more attention to the extraordinary amounts of waste that consumption generates. As shoppers…
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Carbon Emissions in the Supply Chain: Why Supply Chain Emissions Matter and How to Cut Them
Calculating carbon emissions in the supply chain is challenging—especially as supply chains grow more complex and include third parties and stakeholders who perform outsourced operations. When companies disclose greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, those emissions are organized into three categories, or “scopes,” as defined by the GHG Protocol Corporate Standard. While Scope 1 and Scope 2…
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Breaking Down Warehouse Operating Costs
Warehouse operating costs constitute an unavoidable component of supply chain expenses that impact a company’s bottom line. Since these costs differ from company to company, there is no universal formula for cost analysis that operations managers can follow. There are, however, common warehouse expenses related to labor and storage that businesses share. By addressing these…
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3 Sustainable Logistics Management Practices
Achieving sustainability across supply chains is a major objective for businesses across the globe. There has been an estimated 24% increase in the number of companies asking suppliers for reports on environmental data. With freight transportation being a major contributor to costs and air pollution, businesses are focusing on sustainable logistics management practices more than…
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Supply Chain Cost Reduction Challenges
Operations managers routinely look for opportunities to scale up in order to address supply chain cost reduction challenges. Scaling can allow managers to take advantage of lower rates and increased efficiencies. While this strategy can work well for large companies, small and mid-size companies are often unable to realize the benefits of scale. Instead, small…
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How to Lower Freight Costs
In response to pandemic uncertainty, logistics managers are closely examining how to lower freight costs by increasing efficiency, reducing waste, minimizing risks, and spending smarter. While the pandemic’s long-term impact on the shipping industry is difficult to foretell, short-term uncertainty has had a significant impact on freight rates. By September 2020, rates on some trucking…
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How Strong Are Wood Pallets?
Wood—a fundamental component of nearly every early American industry—has been essential to modern shipping and logistics for decades in the form of wood pallets. But just as the homebuilding and ship manufacturing industries adopted stronger materials than wood, the modern shipping industry has likewise evolved. Nowadays, a simple question like “How strong are wood pallets?”…
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The Environmental Impact of Logistics: Making Supply Chains More Sustainable
As supply chains grow more complex, shipments of U.S. goods are expected to accelerate 23.5 percent by 2025. Due to increased freight activities, the environmental impact of logistics will invariably contribute to rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. As a result, businesses are seeking ways to reduce their supply chain carbon footprint and create an environmentally-friendly…