Positive economic indicators in 2014?

The fulfillment and logistics industry can contain some very interesting indicators of the overall health and direction of the economy.  After all, many aspects of fulfillment are tied to consumer confidence through purchasing, and the resulting shipping/fulfillment.

This article from Jeff Berman, a Group News Editor for Logistics Management, provides some indicators from the Department of Commerce, the Association of American Railroads, and a few others which paint a more positive picture based on product movement.  Again, just a different view on the inner workings of our great economy.

Positive economic indicators lend credence to hopes for an improving economy

Vision Consumer Products Fulfillment has decades of experience and industry expertise in consumer products fulfillment services.  No matter who your customer is, we treat your customer as our own.  We know what makes a raving fan out of an individual customer, as well as what makes a business partner trust you with their business.  Call or email us to learn how.  We’re certain we’ll be the best fulfillment warehouse partner you have ever had!

Vision Consumer Products Fulfillment

Fulfillment Warehouse

http://visioncpf.com

CPFSales@VisionMediamgmt.com

What’s new in Fulfillment Technology?

Vision Consumer Products has a long history of being a technology innovator in the Third-Party Logistics (3PL) space.  Necessity is always the key to innovation, particularly in an industry that must constantly balance both efficiency and quality.  Here’s a quick look at some of the key innovations from Vision CPF.

Predictive packaging - Minimization of dunnage (reducing cost and waste), in addition to proper product protection (enhancement of order presentation), are just two critical benefits of Vision’s Predictive Packaging technology.  Vision’s system automatically determines the most optimal size of carton for each order dynamically, based on the product dimensions.

E-Commerce - The customer experience is everything in an e-commerce store.  Today, savvy shoppers expect beautiful online stores with lots of images, community reviews and ratings, social media integration, and more – all while being intuitive and easy to navigate.  Vision Consumer Products Fulfillment provides a great first impression for your customers, including a hassle-free and modern e-commerce experience. Here's a link to our demo store: http://visioncpfdemostore.azurewebsites.net

Intelligent Order Sequencing - Gone are the days when a warehouse team member manually prints pick sheets and order support documentation, and manually plans the picking, packaging, and shipping priorities.  Our Intelligent Order Sequencing technology plans all of this based on predetermined business rules customized for each customer’s program.

Pick to Voice - Pick to Voice can provide exceptional flexibility in a warehouse picking environment, while also maintaining the highest degree of warehouse throughput and efficiency.  At Vision, our trained warehouse personnel leverage this exciting technology to follow a standardized picking process, even with non-standard product.

Nothing demonstrates technology better than seeing it in person.  We would love to give you a tour of our warehouse and show you how we’ve woven proven and innovative technology into our operational processes.

Vision Consumer Products Fulfillment has decades of experience and industry expertise in consumer products fulfillment services.  No matter who your customer is, we treat your customer as our own.  We know what makes a raving fan out of an individual customer, as well as what makes a business partner trust you with their business.  Call or email us to learn how.  We’re certain we’ll be the best fulfillment warehouse partner you have ever had!

Vision Consumer Products Fulfillment
Fulfillment Warehouse Services
http://visioncpf.com
CPFSales@VisionMediamgmt.com

Is Inventory Management and Control Important?

Inventory management in a fulfillment warehouse goes far behind basic cycle counts.  At Vision, it means management and control of your inventory throughout its entire lifecycle – beginning with Inventory control, migration into deep storage and retrieval, and ending with diversion and liquidation.

During the inventory control phase, we actively management your inventory.  We monitor your inventory turn and order velocity in order to dynamically manage your shipping and storage needs.

As the product lifecycle changes, we also provide solutions to manage the overall cost of your inventory footprint, including the blend of deep storage versus picking locations.

Lastly, as you phase out product or slow moving inventory, we can provide complete product diversion and liquidation management.

Nothing demonstrates ability and expertise better than seeing it in person.  We would love to give you a tour of our warehouse and put our inventory control team in front of you.  Our commitment to the safeguarding of your valuable product will be very clear when you meet our Inventory Management team.

Vision Consumer Products Fulfillment has decades of experience and industry expertise in consumer products fulfillment services.  No matter who your customer is, we treat your customer as our own.  We know what makes a raving fan out of an individual customer, as well as what makes a business partner trust you with their business.  Call or email us to learn how.  We’re certain we’ll be the best fulfillment warehouse partner you have ever had!

http://visioncpf.com
CPFSales@VisionMediamgmt.com

How does Pick to Voice work?

Pick to voice is an exciting technology that has gained steam in warehouse technology and operations in the last few years.  Some of this is due to advances in the quality of the voice recognition accuracy, as well as tighter and more efficient integration into existing warehouse operations.

Pick to voice works very well in a fulfillment warehouse when the product base lacks consistency in both size and identification.  In many warehouses, the picking staff does not have 100% UPC bar code labeling.  This makes it difficult to rely on a bar-code only order picking system.  In this situation the fulfillment technology needs to be flexible enough to handle both product with bar codes as well as those without.

A Pick to voice system is built to walk the order picker through a pre-defined operational script; guiding the picker to the correct location while providing a very high level of picking accuracy based on continues challenge/response prompts confirming the product location, the product selection, and the quantity picked.  A well-designed pick to voice process can accomplish this in virtually the same amount of pick time used in a bar code scanning only environment, but with significantly greater flexibility.

We would love to give you a tour of our warehouse and a first hand demonstration of our Pick to Voice technology and processes.  It will give you an entirely new perspective on how flexible a 3PL Fulfillment company can provide scalable and efficient fulfillment even with the most challenging product inventory environments.

Vision Consumer Products Fulfillment has decades of experience and industry expertise in consumer products fulfillment services.  No matter who your customer is, we treat your customer as our own.  We know what makes a raving fan out of an individual customer, as well as what makes a business partner trust you with their business.  Call or email us to learn how.  We’re certain we’ll be the best fulfillment warehouse partner you have ever had!

http://visioncpf.com
CPFSales@VisionMediamgmt.com

How to Speed Up Shipping

All fulfillment warehouses that ship consumer products are faced with the age-old quandary: how to speed up the shipping process.  That includes both picking the inventory and packing out the orders. Most still do it the old fashioned way.  They staff up a manual order routing desk whose sole job is to physically print out, sort, and prioritize the orders into piles, and then give these orders to the order pickers for the inventory pulls.

There has to be a better method right?  After all how do you handle spikes in volume?   How do you optimize priorities in shipping service levels?  How do you build quality into the process itself?

At Vision Consumer Products Fulfillment, our fulfillment technology is second to none, and helps to always maintain our warehouse efficiency.  Vision does it by expert logic in the form of intelligent order sequencing: all order fulfillment planned in advance in real time by the most intelligent business rules created to ship your product on-time, on-budget, and on-spec - every time.

Our system automatically routes our operations to fit your pre-determined best practice business rules – all set up in advance based on sound warehouse picking and packing logic custom tailored to your service level commitments.  This includes sorting, prioritizing, and sequencing of tens of thousands of orders daily, based on the most efficient warehouse location walk sequence for both batch and wave picking, service level commitments, optimal pack out method, and shipping method.  The end result is faster shipping
out of your fulfillment warehouse.

We would love to give you a demonstration.  It will raise your expectations on how fast, efficient, scalable, and accurate your shipping can be.

Vision Consumer Products Fulfillment has decades of experience and industry expertise in consumer products fulfillment services.  No matter who your customer is, we treat your customer as our own.  We know what makes a raving fan out of an individual customer, as well as what makes a business partner trust you with their business.  Call or email us to learn how.  We’re certain we’ll be the best fulfillment warehouse partner you have ever had!


http://visioncpf.com
CPFSales@VisionMediamgmt.com

What is Predictive Packaging?

In a fulfillment warehouse, size matters in shipping - using the right size box for shipping minimizes dunnage, improves the presentation quality of your order upon receipt, and most of all avoids costly dimensional weight penalties.

Many warehouse operations have some predetermined number of standard box sizes, and the order packer manually selects the box in which the order will be fulfilled.  This results in very little consistency, not to mention the potential for a tremendous degree of waste – in extra dunnage and box cost.  An oversized box can also allow excess product shifting, adding to the potential that the product is damaged during delivery.  Lastly, and perhaps most impactful is that in many cases this also costs much more in shipping based on dimensional weight, because frequently a larger than necessary box is used.

Vision Consumer Products Fulfillment’s proprietary predictive packaging algorithms insure the right size is always used in fulfillment and warehouse operations – all done automatically in advance.  Our systems evaluate the order components, determines the best strategy for product combination within each carton, and then selects the most appropriate box size based a predetermined level of acceptable void space.

Ask your current warehouse partner or personnel about predictive packaging.  If you get back a blank stare, then you know you have the opportunity save cost!  If you’re considering a new fulfillment partner, you’ll be surprised at how much the right partner can present many opportunities to save cost while also providing your business with a scalable approach to managing your growth along the way.

Vision Consumer Products Fulfillment has decades of experience and industry expertise in consumer products fulfillment services.  No matter who your customer is, we treat your customer as our own.  We know what makes a raving fan out of an individual customer, as well as what makes a business partner trust you with their business.  Call or email us to learn how.  We’re certain we’ll be the best fulfillment warehouse partner you have ever had!

http://visioncpf.com
CPFSales@VisionMediamgmt.com

How does a Foreign Trade Zone work?

The Foreign Trade Zone Program provides many little-known import/export benefits for a wide range of business applications.  Vision Consumer Products Fulfillment has extensive experience and expertise with setting up and managing a FTZ.

• Duty deferral. Inventory is brought into the Foreign Trade Zone and held without duties and taxes being assessed until the product leaves the FTZ, presumably to be fulfilled as a paid order to a customer.
• Port Fees. For importers that are bringing in more than one container per week, there can be significant reductions in the port fees by utilizing a Foreign Trade Zone.
• Duty Elimination. Inventory re-exported or destroyed without ever leaving the Foreign Trade Zone does not ever get taxed as a US import.
• Speed to market. Product destined for the Foreign Trade Zone bypasses customs delays in the port because it will clear customs in the FTZ, thereby getting product available to sell sooner.

Vision Consumer Products Fulfillment is a certified General Purpose Foreign Trade Zone - #276. We are members of the National Association of Foreign Trade Zones, and we’re one of the few certified General Purpose Foreign Trade Zones in the Southern California area.

If you’re looking to take advantage of the tremendous benefit of leveraging a Foreign Trade Zone, Vision Consumer Products Fulfillment can help.  We have extensive experience at implementing and managing a Foreign Trade Zone warehouse, including coordinating all of your logistics activities straight from your manufacturer.  We’re a full service fulfillment partner.

Vision Consumer Products Fulfillment has decades of experience and industry expertise in consumer products fulfillment services.  No matter who your customer is, we treat your customer as our own.  We know what makes a raving fan out of an individual customer, as well as what makes a business partner trust you with their business.  Call or email us to learn how.  We’re certain we’ll be the best fulfillment warehouse partner you have ever had!

http://visioncpf.com
CPFSales@VisionMediamgmt.com