Your organization’s logistics are constantly working behind the scenes to move your operations forward. Optimizing your industrial logistics can result in smoother operations, decreased cost, reduced waste, and more. Ultimately, a secret key to logistics optimization is collaborating with vendors to remove bottlenecks and improve efficiency whenever possible.
Before we can determine how to use vendors for optimization, we first need to understand the basics. There are three primary constraints in industrial logistics: market, technical, and operational constraints. When you break those constraints down, there are five key elements to logistics: transportation, warehousing, materials handling, information management, and packaging.
In this blog, we will first break down the three constraints followed by an explanation of the five key elements. Lastly, we’ll discuss opportunities for optimization through your vendors.
Logistics Constraints
The backbone of your logistics is managing the supply chain, which we know can be incredibly fickle. The logistics constraints (market, technical, and operational) dictate how effectively and efficiently you can manage your supply chain and, in turn, logistics.
Market constraints speak to customer demand, market trends, and competition. Technical constraints refer to how you use technology in your infrastructure to achieve your logistics goals. Lastly, operational constraints involve your organization’s internal limitations. These can include budget and personnel constraints or even company policy.
Working within your organization’s operational constraints using technology to meet market demand is critical for optimization. For example, investing the resources into a product for which no market demand exists decreases the overall efficiency of your organization just as operating outside your budget creates problems.
The key to logistics optimization is working through these constraints in harmony to achieve your goals. One way to do this is by working with vendors who design their products and services to help optimize your operation’s logistics, but we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Logistics Key Elements
Before we can dive into how vendors can help you achieve your logistics goals, we first need to understand the basic key elements of logistics. These include:
- Transportation,
- Warehousing,
- Materials handling,
- Information management,
- And packaging.
Transportation is how goods move from one location to another and is a major space for efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Whether goods move by road, rail, sea, or air, you need to ensure your operation has access to what it needs to succeed in a timely manner and on budget.
Warehousing involves storing products and goods until needed. Products should be safe, easily located, and in prime condition for use. Maximizing warehouse space is a critical component in a good logistics plan.
Materials handling is how personnel physically handle goods during various stages of the supply chain process. This includes sorting, packaging, loading, and unloading goods. While you might not be able to control this at every step through the supply chain, you can ensure that your personnel understand proper handling techniques to prevent damage and product loss while improving efficiency.
Information management refers to data management, such as tracking inventory level, analyzing metrics, and monitoring schedules.
Packaging is one of the most critical pieces of logistics, as it protects the product to prevent damage and loss. Moreover, good packaging makes the product easier to handle, identify, and implement into your processes.
This is one way that your vendors can play a role in improving your logistics.
Logistics Optimization Through Your Vendors
For maximum optimization, you should consider your vendors and how they can help you. We will break down a few ways we here at Marco Rubber work with our customers to ensure we aid in optimizing their overall operational efficiency, including logistics.
Bagging
We offer standard bulk bagging as well as customized bagging with unlimited parts per bag. We also offer labels or printing on bags, including military-spec bags, to make storing, sorting, and identifying the bags of parts easier.
Marking
Small sealing parts, like o-rings, are our speciality. These can be easily confused or mixed up, so we offer identification marks for each part or seal, such as color dotting to part numbers or specific labels. This helps our customers stay organized and spend less time sorting.
Assemblies
To aid in your operational efficiency and remove potential bottlenecks, we offer supply parts already assembled. For instance, we can supply a center ring with a specific size o-ring already installed.
Kitting
Depending on customer requirements, we can kit according to your configurations. For example, all components can arrive in one bag together or bagged separately. This can save your operation time and effort in organizing and stocking.
On Time In Full (OTIF)
We are excited to announce this advancement in ensuring smooth operational efficiency and logistics on your end. Our new On Time In Full (OTIF) guarantee ensures that all in-stock, commodity o-rings will ship in full within 24 hours of ordering.
This ensures that you receive your order quickly to keep your team on budget and meeting deadlines. We firmly believe that lag due to supply chain issues for essential parts, such as sealing components, should not hold up your entire operation.
Thus, here at Marco Rubber, we are not only dedicated to excellent customer service with quality products, but also to ensuring we are doing our part for our customers’ operational efficiency and logistics.
We take our role as a collaborative partner in our customers’ success seriously and are constantly expanding our efforts to better serve our clients.
If you are curious about more of the ways we currently go above and beyond for our customers, explore our services.