The Quickest Way to Lose Money in Warehousing!
Weekly Pallet Counts - Each week we're contacted by 3PL Warehousing businesses interested in learning more about CartonCloud and how it can help them within their operation. Normally they're reaching out because they're looking for better stock control, client-visibility or integration into Shopify. In some cases they're trying to win a big contract and need their first WMS in order to bring on the work.
We spend a considerable amount of time understanding exactly how their business operates at present, it's important because it allows us to see where there may be pain points, and where we could assist.
Time and time again we encounter this discussion:
Us: "How do you currently charge storage? How do you know what to bill?"
Client: "Oh, we send Dave around the warehouse each Friday afternoon and he counts the pallets so we can bill them for the week prior"
Us: ".... oh my"
When pallets are manually counted at the end of each week, the business misses out on the biggest money maker of all, the stuff that comes in and goes out within the week, which you should always be charging for! It's why your price list states "Week or part thereof".
The numbers are staggering. If you store 20 pallets for a client and within the week 10 new come in, and 10 old go out, then at the end of the week you'll count 20 pallets. However, you've actually stored 30 pallets in that time, you could be charging 50% more money! It's even worse if the pallets came in and went out in the same week, in that case you never charge anything for those pallets. Multiply this by thousands of pallets and lots of customers across a warehouse, and you quickly end up seeing thousands of dollars per week being lost as what we term "revenue leakage".
When we hear this, we know their business is going to recover an enormous amount of revenue by using CartonCloud's warehouse management system, oftentimes it's many multiples more money recovered than what the system itself costs!
In closing, if you're running a warehouse and are performing manual pallet counts in order to charge storage, it's guaranteed that each week you'll be bleeding revenue. Give us a call today and let us help you out.