Locus For Retail – 4 Walls Excellence

The number of warehouses is growing rapidly, with enterprises increasingly investing in warehouse space. A recent study predicts that the number of warehouses globally will rise from 151,000 in 2020 to 180,000 by 2025. In addition to this increase, there’s an emerging trend of converting retail spaces into mini warehouses.

For example, Walmart recently decided to convert sections of their stores into mini warehouses. Retail enterprises with physical outlets are not only transforming their store spaces into warehouses but are also investing in the automation, optimization, and digitalization of these mini warehouses to save costs and increase profitability.

While this surge is promising for the logistics sector, it raises a critical question: Are enterprises investing in warehouse efficiency as much as they are in warehouse space?

Achieving a decent return on investment (ROI) in the long run hinges on maintaining peak warehouse efficiency. The concept of “Four Walls Excellence” is key to this. Let’s explore what it means and how it can be achieved.

What Are the Four Walls of Excellence in Retail?

“Four Walls of Excellence” refers to the critical elements ensuring seamless and efficient warehouse operations. These operations determine the efficiency of delivery vehicles and minimize the total time spent within the warehouse, which includes both planned wait time and any excess time.

According to Locus, the Four Walls of Excellence in retail operations include:

• Picking and Packing: Efficiently gathering and packaging products for orders.
  
• Scanning: Accurately capturing data for inventory management and tracking.
  
• Sorting: Organizing items based on delivery routes and priorities.
  
• Load Formation: Strategically placing items in vehicles to optimize space and order of delivery.

These elements are crucial for maintaining high standards in warehouse efficiency and delivery performance.

How Locus Enhances the Four Walls of Excellence

To ensure timely order delivery, enterprises must maintain peak warehouse efficiency, largely determined by the four walls of excellence. Locus, a logistics tech platform, helps digitalize, automate, and optimize hub operations to achieve this. Here’s how:

Intelligent Sorting Engine

Locus’s intelligent sorting engine auto-sorts orders based on constraints such as the nature of the order, speed of delivery, and service zones. This ensures quick, accurate, and efficient sorting, eliminating sorting mistakes.

Integrated Load Formation

Locus’s platform assigns orders to suitable pallets or trucks, optimizing for volume and cost efficiency. This improves vehicle capacity utilization and reduces empty miles.

Automated Load Balancing

Locus’s automated load balancing feature minimizes time spent in hubs through last-in, first-out loading operations, facilitating frictionless loading and unloading.

Operational Insights

Real-time execution data provides operational insights inside the warehouse, enabling businesses to optimize operations, reduce time under the roof, cut down package sorting mistakes, and prevent SLA breaches from delays. These insights bridge the gap between expected and actual performance.

Granular Visibility of Hub and Fulfillment

Locus offers uninterrupted granular visibility at the hub level, including proof of delivery and chain of custody transfer. Real-time updates and intelligent alerts help businesses stay on top of shipment progress from dispatch to delivery.

Locus’s Impact on Hub Level Efficiency

Enterprises often face the decision of whether to buy or build hub operations solutions. Building solutions offers greater control over data and tech stacks but incurs tech maintenance and tech debt costs as orders scale up. Buying a cloud-based solution like Locus saves time, energy, resources, and costs associated with building and maintaining tech stacks, allowing enterprises to efficiently manage on-ground operations without excessive expenditure.

Locus is a highly sought-after logistics tech platform due to its responsive customer service team, which proactively resolves deployment issues and reduces time to value. Locus’s hub management solution delivers transformative results, such as:

• 100% chain of custody
  
• Improved delivery drop density
  
• High capacity utilization
  
• Reduction in time under the roof
  
• Cuts down errors in manual workflows
  
• Increases the speed of package sorting
  
• Lowered transaction time
  
• Seamless returns verification
  
• Effective payment reconciliation
  
• On-time trip completion

Locus’s offerings integrate easily with existing tech stacks, including Warehouse Management Systems (WMS), Transportation Management Systems (TMS), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems.

Having helped businesses in over 30 countries solve complex logistics problems, Locus has enabled more than 1.2 billion deliveries and ensured a 99.5% Service Level Agreement (SLA) for its enterprise clients.

How Locus helped BlueDart-DHL improve the efficiency of its hub operations?

BlueDart Express, a leading package distribution company, serves an extensive network of over 35,000 locations and 220+ countries. However, they faced significant challenges with their hub operations. The shipment sorting and processing were error-prone and time-consuming, leading to inefficiencies in on-ground operations and difficulty in managing seasonal variations.

Their major issues centered around three aspects:

• Increased human dependence in shipment processing
  
• Overutilization of resources leading to high overhead costs
  
• Negative impact on SLA compliance and delivery efficiencies

Locus addressed these challenges with its Four Walls Excellence approach, resulting in remarkable improvements for BlueDart Express:

• Time Savings: Locus helped reduce parcel sorting time by 60%.
  
• Resource Optimization: The number of sorting personnel required was cut by 70%.
  
• Accuracy: Locus enabled the accurate identification of misrouted shipments for proactive escalation management.

With these enhancements made using the Locus platform, BlueDart Express significantly improved its hub operations, achieving greater efficiency and reliability.

Still unsure about optimizing, digitalizing, and automating hub operations?
Schedule a demo with us today!

References

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1271245/warehouses-worldwide/#:~:text=Number%20of%20warehouses%20worldwide%202020%2D2025&text=In%202020%2C%20there%20were%20approximately,just%20under%20180%2C000%20by%202025

https://nypost.com/2021/01/27/walmart-to-convert-dozens-of-stores-into-high-tech-warehouses