Manufacturing and logistics are two crucial aspects of the industrial world. However, they have become even more important with the increasing global trade, demand for goods, and eCommerce growth. Therefore, manufacturing sites must streamline their logistics operations. There are nearly 638, 583 manufacturing businesses in the USA, which is 1.4% higher than the previous year, i.e., 2021.
Logistics 4.0 is rapidly advancing and driving the digital transformation of businesses. Similarly, strict customer demands for quick deliveries also call for digitization in manufacturing logistics. In such circumstances, manufacturing sites need to overhaul their logistics model if they want to survive in today's competitive market and meet customer demands. In this article, we will explain five simple ways manufacturing sites can adopt to unlock their logistics efficiency.
What Is Manufacturing Logistics?
Manufacturing logistics refers to managing the transportation and storage of materials and finished products in the manufacturing plant. It includes several activities, such as transporting raw materials to the production plant, finished products to the warehouse and customers, and managing inventory levels.
Ways to Improve Logistics Efficiency
In this section, we will discuss five critical ways manufacturing sites can strengthen their supply chain and improve logistics efficiency.
1. Get Rid of Spreadsheets
Manufacturing sites must ditch spreadsheet or Excel models and embrace digitization in the supply chain. Every step of the supply chain should be digitized, from ordering to production and logistics. Having a centralized and integrated solution for production and planning breaks functional silos in a cross-organizational manner. Also, it simplifies gathering, sorting, and analyzing data for manufacturing companies and sites.
By relying on spreadsheets, the manufacturing sites become stiff and less agile because predictive planning and visualization are hard to engage with static data sets. Through digitization, you can incorporate dynamic data sets, which provide manufacturing sites agility and end-to-end visibility.
2. Deploy Modern Technology to Process Packages
Manufacturing sites have to process thousands of packages daily. Having outdated or legacy systems that involve manual data entry creates challenges, consumes a lot of time, and affects the staff's productivity. To increase logistics efficiency at your manufacturing site, you must invest in a modern, smart, and easy-to-use technology that automates your logistics operations.
Receive is a package management software that processes inbound deliveries within seconds at any receiving site. It automates all the package receiving operations, such as label data ingestion, notifications to the recipients, package storage, forwarding, pick-up, and retrieval. You can package labels with our AI-powered label OCR and auto-ingest package data into the system with up to 100% precision. Moreover, it allows you to map various steps of your receiving process.
3. Get a Smart Package Shipping Solution
Shipping is one of the most crucial processes at manufacturing sites. Therefore, it is necessary to have optimized and intuitive shipping software that simplifies the process. Ship is one such shipping platform that automates your label generation and lets you generate and track shipments in one place. It has a network of 100+ carriers and on-demand couriers that you can choose for shipping after comparing their rates.
4. Automate Manufacturing Inventory Management
Another best way to enhance logistics efficiency at manufacturing sites is automating inventory management. Managing inventory levels can be a challenge at manufacturing sites. Production schedules and customer demand can fluctuate, making it difficult to maintain sufficient stock levels. As a result, disruption can occur in production.
The primary goal of inventory management is to have the right inventory level all the time without any stockouts or excess inventory. PackageX Inventory streamlines inventory workflows for your manufacturing site to increase productivity, efficiency, and visibility. With a digital log of inventory, manufacturers can plan the production process in a streamlined manner and improve their inventory management. Moreover, you can automate your package storage and retrieval workflows with our manufacturing inventory management software.
5. Foresee and Mitigate Disruptions
In today's global economy, a manufacturing company is stable and productive if it can forecast, mitigate, and combat possible disruptions or breakdowns. Manufacturing companies must be able to predict when disruptions occur and take necessary steps to avoid them. It can be done through real-time reporting, data gathering, simulations, forecasting, and creating actionable plans to prevent breakdowns in the future.
Conclusion
The manufacturing industry nowadays is up against a flexible and diversified landscape. To provide efficient customer service, all the gears of manufacturing logistics must fit together. It is only possible when you introduce automation to your logistics operations, increasing efficiency and productivity. You can avoid interruptions to your manufacturing site operations through integrated tools to process and track mail, packages, and inventory with PackageX apps. In addition, you can build custom apps for your manufacturing site logistics operations using our APIs.
