Your business is growing so fast you risk falling into a Death Spiral if you don’t know how to Scale.
Your business is not just growing it’s evolving. You’re bringing in new stock and entering new markets, pivoting to wholesale, importing bulk stock, reworking stock that has been mis-labelled. Your online marketplace strategy is taking off and now you need so much stock you’re moving to another warehouse that you’re sharing with another business to make it affordable until you can fill it yourself. It’s all happening, you are finally getting the success you dreamed of, but your spreadsheets are getting more complicated as you try and keep it under control. The sales keep growing, and if you’re honest with yourself, you and your staff are not coping, and your current systems are not up to the job. You need a better way to keep track of what’s going on to avoid permanent reputation damage.
3 Signs you are near or in a Death Spiral
- You often don’t get all your orders out on time
- You are throwing labour at the problem and it’s not working
- Customer Complaints are time consuming, getting very loud and public
How do you Scale?
If you want a business that scales you have to move from people dependence to process dependence. All of the expert knowledge about your business that is in the heads of your staff must be embodied in the systems and procedures that support your processes.
Scaling is the ability to reliably increase or decrease your output as demand varies. Most people have businesses that do not Scale. When demand peaks come, their processes are so time consuming and dependent on special staff knowledge that adding extra staff has no impact. The special knowledge of how to do things is contained only in the heads of people who are busy doing the work, have no time to teach and despite exhausting themselves they fall further and further behind.
If you want a business that scales you have to move from people dependence to process dependence. All of the expert knowledge about your business that is in the heads of your staff must be embodied in the systems and procedures that support your processes.
How do you Scale a Warehouse?
You have a finance system to mange your money, an inventory system to manage your orders and stock levels but why don’t you have a warehouse system to manage your warehouse?
The short answer is that this has traditionally been the preserve of big business because a lot of small and medium sized businesses were simple, not very dynamic and could get away without one. But that is no longer the case. Many small and medium businesses are more complex and dynamic than most big businesses. They now need the sophistication of a Warehouse Management System (WMS). A few short years ago online retail was a very small part of retail and easily handled in a small way. Now online retail might be the only channel of a very successful business that started a year ago in a garage.
If you want to scale your warehouse you will need a warehouse management system to hold all of the expert knowledge from the heads of your warehouse staff. The Logistics Cloud Co. WMS manages all of your warehouse processes in the mobile workflow, from receiving and putaway, stock counting, replenishment, picking packing and shipping. So that it is now easy to train casual staff to help manage peak workloads. Casuals can get to work immediately, and you can track their progress to full productivity to make sure you are getting the best out of your people.
Now there are no limits
In the past WMS was the preserve of big business due to the cost of the software and the implementation, but we’re changing all that. The Logistics Cloud Co. WMS gives you the flexibility and scalability to use one system from startup to global distribution. Start small with the multi-tenant Cloud version and when you grow big you can move to your own server or a fully managed hosted server with your own instance of the software.
Then you can build custom workflows that give you an edge your competitors don’t have. The same software grows with you and keeps your operations working in the same efficient and familiar manner even if you change your inventory or accounting systems or move to a more sophisticated ERP system. And if you get really big, The LCC WMS is ready to connect with warehouse automation such as storage and retrieval systems and robotics.
If you’re ready to scale your warehouse, call us today to find out more.