Operations and Logistics tips and tricks to help your business grow
Sometimes when starting out, businesses can often make mistakes in not ensuring that your operations ( How your product is designed and made) does not correlate to your logistics ( How your product is packaged and shipped) In this article we will discuss 3 main things to consider when launching your products that consider both operations and logistics
Boxes Vs Item Size
In this scenario we ship by the pallet and each individual item in our stock that gets sent into amazon FBA is placed in a larger box specifically designed to fit onto a pallet.
Questions to ask youseelf:
Do you ship orders that are ordered in bulk?
Do you carry more than one item?
When launching a product or bringing a new product into the line of products already available, one must think about what is already available.
Questions to ask yourself and consider:
Do I have a usual box order or item that I already sell already?
Will I continue to use the same box that I already have?
Explanation:
This is because to reduce risks and costs. It wouldn’t make sense to launch a new product that cannot fit into boxes already available, neither would it make sense to have to order and stock boxes for every single box. This thought process is important because you definitely don’t want to be shipping empty space so a quick reference check on these two things is crucial to check first
Product Assembly
Still in regards to product packaging/manufacturing and shipping. How your product is assembled must also be considered in the operations phase. This is important because it can either save costs in shipping by reducing shipping size, or it may increase costs if not planned out properly. Take for example one of our newly redesigned products
Sample before redesign
Sample after redesign
As you can see the before redesigning process the product on the left was obliged to be packed and shipped as in, taking a lot of space in the process. The product on the right was redesigned to be folded out and thus taking less space for shipping and lowering shipping costs.
Unnecessary packaging
In our post here, you can read about things to add your packaging to create brand awareness, though there does come a time where too much packaging can be a bad thing. Always keep in mind on where you are selling your product. For this post, we are keeping in mind that we are selling our products on amazon FBA. Amazon will base your storage fees off the largest side of your packaging thus, take for example in your average brick and mortar distributor you have to be conscious on how your product will be displayed on the shelves whereas with online selling and e-commerce the two most important factors are
1. Product safety in getting to the customer
2. Keeping shipping costs down
Product packaging only needs to just cover and protect the product whilst following FDA regulations; as this is a consumer product
Sample of unnecessary packaging in that there is a lot of empty space
Hopefully these tips will help in the process of planning and organizing the operations and logistics of your products