Security Issues for Confidential Cargo

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, cargo theft costs an estimated 15-30 billion dollars in the United States alone. For shippers who want to determine if their shipments will be safe, a good rule of thumb is that if you can package it, crate it, and ship it, there is a high likelihood that there exists a criminal enterprise who will try to steal it. For businesses who rely on just in time inventory, loss of freight can be a very worrying problem that can threaten profitability. By classifying your confidential cargo correctly, you may be able to prevent would-be thieves from getting their hands on your precious shipment. 

Your goods are more likely to be disturbed or stolen while in transit than at any other time. Theft is a common problem in the transportation industry due to roadway congestion, carriers at full carrying capacity, a shortage of qualified drivers, and the growth of cross docking in warehouses. If you are concerned your cargo may be at risk, here are a few things potential thieves look for.

• The attractiveness of the product, usually dependent on its street value.
• The type of banding, shrink wrap, tape or straps used to secure the load.
• The integrity of the cartons holding the product.
• The type of transportation carrier used: air, sea, rail, or truck.
• The skill level of the workforce at every nodal point of the route.

However there are several ways you can protect your cargo: through containment, identity, or through the visibility of tamper evidence. Containment largely involves making sure that your cartons and cases are fully secure, and not easily replaceable, generic boxes that can be quickly replaced to hide tampering. 

Identity means classifying your cargo as confidential before a major shipment. This means that dock workers and drivers will have no idea what is in the shipment or even the identiy of the shipper. This can also be helpful for businesses who want to ship products discretely in order to secure a competitive advantage by moving into a new market first.

Finally by integrating tamper resistant and tamper evident seals onto boxes, or using tamper evident tape and labels to secure cartons and documents.

For more information on how to protect your sensitive shipments and confidential cargo, contact www.shippgl.com today!

Warehousing Distribution as a Cost Saver

Managing your businesses supply chain is one of the best ways to protect your brand identity and keep customers happy. By partnering with a warehousing and fulfillment services provider, many small business owners are able to effectively minimize the amount of time and resources spent on storing and shipping goods. In fact, many modern businesses never even see or touch the products they sell, since they outsource all of their logistics, fulfillment, and customer service operations. Here is your warehousing distribution fact book to provide you with a sample of all of the services available to streamline your logistics operations.

Warehousing

Many logistics companies maintain multiple warehousing locations to provide the most strategic placement of inventory to minimize transportation costs. These warehousing providers also offer complete inventory management and control to make sure there is always product on hand to fill customer needs. As they process orders, package and ship products, new product is automatically ordered from manufactures and predetermined inventory stock points.

No matter the particular requirements of your products, you are guaranteed proper storage and packaging to maintain pristine product quality. Most warehousing companies typically provide quality yard management services, and label all products with bar codes for maximum accuracy in filling orders. If your products are typically kits of various different kinds of goods, most warehousing providers also provide complete kitting and total value added services.

Distribution

Using a logistics providers distribution services, you will ensure you products arrive at the correct place, at the right price, at the right time, every time. Regardless of whether you are shipping products to end users or retail locations, a professional distributor will make sure your product is where it needs to be every time. As product is shipped out, inventory within the warehouse is replenished and fulfilled automatically.

For a full breakdown of the warehousing distribution factbook, contact the logistics experts at shippgl.com now!

What Exactly is Merge-In-Transit?

Merge-in-transit is a global logistics solution that allows businesses to take optimize their inventory management procedures and greatly reduce shipping costs. Many business owners are outsourcing these services to third party logistics providers in order to reduce costs and free up more time so they can focus on more important decisions. Here is your guide to how merge-in-transit can work for your business.

In general, this service allows you to oursource the management, coordination, and procurement of multiple components of raw materials for your production line. Components can be shipped from various manufacturers and warehouses to one place where they can be prepped to await order fulfillment. For instance, if you have separate manufacturers for your packaging and the various components your product, these can be brought together in a centrally-located place and stocked for fulfillment. 

To break it down further, this is the process in four steps:

1. Your customer places an order that requires multiple components.

2. Your various suppliers provide stock to your merge-in-transit fulfillment center who manages an constant inventory of product.

3. The various product components will be stored temporarily.

4. As the orders come in, warehousing experts pick the components, carefully pack them into one shipment, and send them to the ordering customer.

If your business is one that typically sells a high valume of various products, this is an incredibly valuable service that can allow you to free up valuable resources. Your company is provided with a global solution to coordinate customer orders regardless of the amount of components in each shipment. 

Depending on how much control you want to retain, or alternatively, how much freedom you want to gain, there are a variety of service available to be outsourced. A third party logistics provider can provide services as varied as order fulfillment, inventory management, returns, and even customer service and satisfaction.

How Do Integrated Inventory Management Systems Benefit You?

Whether ordering raw materials or preventing bottlenecks in your production line, integrated inventory management systems provide you with high quality information to streamline your business, automate processes, and reduce costs. Carefully maintaining the cost of ordering, transporting, and storing inventory of raw materials and finished goods is absolutely critical to staying lean in these uncertain economic times.

Automation

Many inexpensive inventory softwares will help you automate your reordering and restocking processes. As product moves off your production line or out your dock door to be delivered to your customers, it is scanned and registered within the inventory management system. You can select an automatic reorder once inventory levels fall below your buffer as determined by the lead time of your suppliers. This helps you minimize the cost of storing raw materials and finished products inventory.

Pricing

As you begin to reduce your operational costs, you may find that you can extend these costs savings to your customers to further drive business and reach a greater market. Depending on your product and market, you may be able to lower your sales price to generate demand and sell to more customers. While this requires careful attention to customer demand and stock levels, it can effectively be integrated into your business strategy.

Identifying Inefficiencies

One of the biggest advantages of having a software solution in place to help you manage inventory is the access you will have to accurate, real-time data. This data can be modeled and manipulated to help you identify opportunities, areas for improvement, and potential threats to your business. Many inventory software solutions are operated from an incredibly user-friendly web portal. From here, reports can quickly and easily be generated to help you identify new opportunities.

A professional logistics consultant can be a great asset in integrating an inventory management system into your business. Visit PerimeterLogistics.com today to see how you can make the transition!

Does Your Operation Need a Contract Warehouse?

Many small business owners are effectively outsourcing greater and greater portions of their companies to create a ‘lifestyle business’ or entrepreneurial ‘muse.’ Essentially these business are bootstrapped at the lowest possible cost before operations are systemized and outsourced to create passive income for the business owner. One of the key steps in this process for businesses that sell physical products is to outsource distribution to a contract warehouse.

With a dedicated contract to a warehouse or fulfillment company, you can outsource all product handling and order fulfillment so that you can focus solely on growing your business. Most fulfillment houses are located centrally within your market to achieve the lowest possible delivery time to your most remote customers. Your warehousing partner can even manage inventory levels and reorder product straight from the manufacturer.

Orders can be received online and fulfilled by the competent and highly-trained warehousing staff. Delivery will then be scheduled for maximum cost effectiveness to the consumer. Should there be any problems with an order, most fulfillment operations offer a customer service department to handle complaints.

Imagine not having to worry about or ever even physically see and touch your products. All operations regarding the movement of your products can be completely automated allowing you to focus on sales and strategy until even this can be outsourced. Contract warehouses are the ticket for making your passive income dreams happen.

Since they often serve multiple clients, a warehousing provider can significantly defray his costs and pass that savings on to each client. Outsourcing logistics is always far more cost-effective than attempting to build and maintain these same systems in house. A warehousing provider has already absorbed the costs of industrial space, labor, and security measures. They are often staffed with teams of highly educated transportation engineers who work together to increase the efficiency of operations, and provide world-class service to both their clients and their clients’ customers.

For more information on how you can use contract warehousing to outsource your product handling operations, click here now!

Temperature Controlled Trailers and Food Safety

Each day, more and more meals are consumed outside the home, necessitating the movement of millions of cases of produce and other food consumables to be delivered to restaurants, hospitals, and college campuses nationwide. Moving these highly perishable goods safely from the farm to your dinner plate requires a highly orchestrated network of transportation providers to move goods safely and prevent spoil or contaimination by pest or disease. Temperature controlled containers help food shippers maintain the best possible enviroment to keep food safe during storage and shipment.

Every company that moves food items has in place a complex system for ensuring consumer protection as per regulations set forth by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA). These agencies issue ‘best practices’ guidelines every year for everything from sanitation to packing to warehousing. All of these best practices in some way refer to a shippers ability to maintain a ‘cold’ supply chain. 

As you know from storing milk, cheese, eggs, meat and vegetables in your refrigerator, food items can be preserved in cold environments. Using refrigerated docks and temperature and humidity regulated containers, distribution companies are able to maintain a strict temperature and humidity profile to slow down the deterioration of food goods, create an inhospitable environment for bacteria, mold and fungi, and maintain inventory at its most pristine levels. Using temperature and humidity regulated trailers and containers provides a temperature controlled mobile storage solution to preserve goods no matter their destination.

Companies face the potentially crippling cost of legal settlements should someone become ill because food products were contaminated during shipment. However maintaining a pristine supply chain from farm to fork is a definite challenge. Climate controlled containers are simply the best way for food distributors and retailers to maintain the ‘cold’ chain and minimize risk of loss due to spoil, infestation or contamination.

Click here for more information on how climate regulated containers can help you keep your perishable goods safe during shipment or storage. 

5 Benefits of Contract Warehouses

A contract warehouse helps companies and entrepreneurs store inventory, supplies, raw materials, or any other good in a central location for maximum transportation efficiency. Since the warehouses are centrally located, they can be easily transported to nearly any destination in the contiguous U.S. It also allows businesses to outsource the costs of both space and labor associated with storing inventory. In order for businesses to succeed, many are taking advantage of outsourcing much of their operations to third parties. You are guaranteed to reduce your overhead costs and increase your bottom line by outsourcing your warehousing needs. Here are five benefits:

1. Services: Many warehouses offer a variety of services to cater to manufacturers and distributors. Whether you need packaging services, inventory control and management, local transportation, or ongoing maintenance and quality control, a contract warehouse can offer these services. The larger warehouses even offer fulfillment and customer relationship services. For many business owners, that means they can completely outsource operations so they can focus on strategy and building their business.

2. Cost: The difference in the cost of holding your goods in a contract warehouse versus a private warehouse is enormous. By taking advantage of serving multiple clients, a contract warehouse can make better use of their assets, namely, warehouse space and loading docks. This allows them to carry lower overhead costs, and those cost savings are then passed on to their clients.

3. Fees: In many public and private warehouses, the lessee is required to pay storage fees and loading and unloading fees anytime they ship goods. A contract warehouse can offer services at lower costs, and can often work with you to find the right combination of services to fit your budget.

4. Control: On the spectrum of warehouses, private facilities offer complete control with a the highest cost, similar to buying a house. A public warehouse is more like leasing an apartment, giving you little control. The contract warehouse serves up the perfect compromise between control and cost. This allows many small businesses to outsource their inventory holding and product fulfillment costs, so they can focus on generating more revenue and other business critical tasks. 

To reduce your warehousing and inventory control costs, check out the many great contract warehouse services available at PerimeterLogistics.com!