throughout your warehouse,” Kressin advises. “And the quality of the touches that happen is also important.” Alpine’s Pick-to-Light and Pick-and- Pass inventory management strategies help streamline operations. They allow for exibility in ful lling orders that might change or add something suddenly—like a special promotion gift. The strategies ensure product gets out the door on average as well as high situation days. MIDDLE GROUND Once a product’s journey through a warehouse is complete, the next phase of the process begins: shipping. Effective and cost-saving e-ful llment hinges on getting the mode of transport right. An eye must also be cast on the nature of the product. Is it perishable or non- perishable? Is the product a cheesecake or a pair of shoes? The consumer wants both as quickly as possible and although there is some leeway with shoes, there’s not as much with a cheesecake. What happens during the middle mile of a product’s journey is crucial. A non-perishable item can be combined with other shipments and incorporate slower transit times to keep costs down. A perishable item doesn’t have that exibility. “When a company ships a perishable item, it becomes more of a negotiation with its existing providers than operational changes the company needs to do,” says Daniel Sokolovsky, CEO and founder of WARP, a company that specializes in the middle mile. WARP handles direct store distribution, direct carrier injections, and warehouse-to- warehouse transfers. Refrigerated trucks are essential for perishable items throughout the middle mile despite their higher cost. However, some cost savings can be achieved by relying on ice packs, or even double ice packs, during the last mile. Sometimes the cost of keeping an item fresh can actually be higher than the cost of the product itself. It’s a hazard of the food delivery business in particular, subscription boxes being a case in point. The increased cost must
Boxes wait to be filled at the start of the order process at MONAT Global's warehouse. The wellness product company partnered with Alpine Supply Chain Solutions to implement inventory management systems that help streamline fulfillment operations.
be folded into the price of a product up front. The moment that shippers of non- perishable products acquire inventory is not directly tied to the moment that they send the inventory. Not so with perishable items because to have a shipment arrive spoiled is a no-win situation. “Perishable presents its own unique set of challenges,” says Sokolovsky. “You have to properly plan for the inbound portion of that inventory. If you order too much, you could end up throwing it away. If you order too little, it could mean you can’t satisfy all your customers.” FINAL STRETCH “Perishability is a ticking time bomb,” says Adam Bryant, CEO of AxleHire, a tech-enabled last-mile urban delivery provider that handles next-day and same- day shipments. The company has a number of subscription box services in its customer base and quite a few of them are in the meal kit space where orders are generally shipped out weekly. Freshness aside—an aspect that is non-negotiable—the end consumer is also hyper-focused on their order being delivered on time as they’re trying to plan their meals for the week. “If their orders don’t arrive on Monday or whatever
day they planned on, that affects them directly,” says Bryant. AxleHire partners with multiple shippers, aggregating and commingling their volume so they can all take advantage of each other’s density. Then it matches supply with demand, leveraging the gig economy from a driver’s perspective to get the packages delivered. As a last-mile service provider, AxleHire features very short transit times. It has sortation facilities in each of the major metropolitan areas it serves. “We offer exibility and since we leverage the gig economy, we’re an asset-light model,” says Bryant. “We can quickly scale up and down, and price competitively and transparently due to that low asset xed model.” AxleHire uses end-to-end technology it built in-house—encompassing everything from order intake into its system, routing, and the warehouse management system it uses to orchestrate the sortation process, as well as the booking links it puts up for drivers, the in-app navigation of getting an order to the doorstep, proof of delivery, and sharing of dashboards. “We have real-time tracking on everything that goes on so we can share that with clients and recipients,” Bryant says. “It’s fungible and can work with meal kit and e-commerce companies.” n
176 Inbound Logistics • January 2023
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