Lutheran Brothers, a warehouse and storage facility in Detroit, Michigan, understands the benefits and subtle nuances of shipping and storage. What are the benefits of warehouse shipping is a question they get asked all the time.

At its core, shipping and storage are some of the links in the chain of ensuring goods and products arrive in the hands of your customers or on the shelves of department stores. If your products don’t make it from your plant directly into the hands of the consumer, chances are you’re going to be utilizing a warehouse facility at some point in the process. Warehousing relies on inventory management, and that means you must have steps in place to track your items in real time. Proper inventory management will help prevent overstocking of your products. If you experience overstocking, that could also mean you’re getting hit with higher-than-necessary warehouse fees.

How does warehouse delivery work?

To understand how warehouse delivery works, you need to understand the importance of “warehouse-to-door last-mile delivery.” It’s estimated that last-mile delivery accounts for more than 50% of the shipping costs a company incurs. If a company doesn’t look at its processes to ensure they’re optimizing its last-mile delivery, its bottom line will take a hit.   

Warehouse delivery is an intricate dance of coordination between manufacturers, shippers and warehouse facilities. Business owners need to determine the best means of transport for their products – rail, ship or over the road. Once that cost has been estimated, now comes the process to ensure there are seamless shipping to delivery steps in place.

How can a business do that?

  1. It’s all about inventory management. Warehousing and delivery is only a small step in the process. Tracking and managing inventory and keeping accurate records will reduce overstocking and warehouse fees and also ensure you’re not running low on, or out of, inventory.
  2. When is the order picked and how? Are your products shipped by the pallet or piece by piece based on when a customer places an order? Are you using automated tracking and picking systems?
  3. Following the items being picked up, packing the products requires careful and secure packaging to prevent breakage and protect items from being lost or stolen in transit.
  4. Your labeling of packages is essential to effective shipment and delivery but also to effectively having your products removed from the warehouse facility and moved along the delivery chain.  

Warehouse shipping, a process that is on the uptick, streamlines the supply chain and can cut down the time it takes for your products to reach the hands of your customers.

Some of the benefits of this process include:

  1. Cost reduction.
  2. Increased delivery speeds.
  3. It’s considered a more sustainable business model.
  4. Warehouse shipping could be a way for a manufacturer to set itself apart from the competition. Warehouse shipping could mean your products are getting in the hands of your customers overnight – or same-day.  

It might be too late to capitalize on warehouse shipping for the holiday season this year, but if you’re considering it in the future, here are some of the benefits of warehouse shipping delivery.

  1. Many customers are demanding more flexible delivery options and faster deliveries, and this model offers both.
  2. Because warehouse shipping requires you to have precise inventory tracking in place, you alleviate the issue of overstock or low inventory.
  3. Warehouse shipping is better able to deal with scale if your business has a peak demand season.

When you’re looking for secure, easy-to-access, quality, experienced storage professionals, contact Lutheran Brothers.

If you are looking for clean, secure and economical warehouse space to lease and operate your business in with your own personnel, look no further than Lutheran Brothers in Detroit, Michigan.