Think about the last package you received. At one point, it was probably on a ship, at a port, on a truck, at a warehouse, at a distribution facility, on a last mile vehicle, and finally on your doorstep. Moving goods is like a complex song-and-dance between all the different players in the supply chain—one that requires everyone to be moving in lockstep with one another. This becomes extremely important in the hand-off between transportation and warehousing. That’s exactly why seamless communication between transportation and warehousing matters.
We sat down with Felix Vicknair, VP of Supply Chain Solutions at Kenco, for a Q&A on the importance of seamless communication between transportation and warehousing, how it impacts labor and customer experience, and why an integrated 3PL is the answer to achieving better visibility and communication throughout the supply chain.
Question: When we’re talking about communication between transportation providers and warehouses, what exactly do we mean here?
Felix: On the very basic end, it’s about scheduling—specifically, understanding the timing of when shipments are coming and what’s on those shipments. It’s having that visibility so you can manage dock scheduling and ensure you have the right staffing setup for receiving the shipments. Communication is so critical for coordinating and facilitating those transactions as seamlessly as possible.
Question: You mentioned staffing, which is super important for logistics. How does having good (or bad) communication impact labor planning?
Felix: If I’m an operations manager, I have a certain headcount that I’m planning to bring in for an expected amount of shipment volume. But say there have been delays on the road, and now I’ve got a different quantity of inbound receipts that are coming. Maybe all of the morning’s shipments are delayed until the afternoon. What I can do now is have my team redirected to go support other functions in the meantime. If I’m not aware of those delays, what ultimately happens is, I don’t redirect the team, and now I’ve got a four hour window where they’re just standing around with nothing to do, waiting for the trucks to come. The more visibility and awareness that I have about the timing of those shipments, the better I can plan my staff, the more efficient and productive we can be, and the most cost-effective we can be by potentially avoiding overtime costs.
Question: Why would a warehouse need to know exactly what’s on a shipment?
Felix: Knowing what’s arriving on a shipment as well as the current inventory sitting inside the warehouse comes in handy when it comes to facilitating outbound shipments. Say you have an inbound shipment of product A and I have hundreds of pallets of product A in the building—that’s not impacting anything. If there’s a shipment delay, there’s less of a need to make an instant decision. But if I don’t have any of product A at the warehouse, now I really need that inbound truck to arrive. That’s where that becomes much more of a critical piece, and can impact the end consumer.
Question: How does it impact the end consumer?
Felix: Having the right visibility helps facilitate a better experience for the end consumer, especially when there are issues that pop up. Here’s an example. Say a customer ordered 10 different items. We’ve got 9 of them in the warehouse, and we’ve been waiting on the last one to arrive. If I know that one is delayed, I can now have a conversation with the customer. How important is it that they get those other nine items when we promised them? Would they prefer that we wait on that last item to get there to ship all 10 at the same time? It also opens up opportunities to see if we’ve got that same inventory somewhere else. At the end of the day, awareness gives us the ability to open up a dialogue with the customer to make things right.
Question: Besides better labor planning and customer experience, are there other benefits to having good communication between transportation and warehousing?
Felix: Of course. The examples I gave earlier fall into the category of in-the-moment, tactical decision-making. But there’s a longer term, strategic angle planning angle as well. When we have better visibility and communication, we can start to see patterns emerge. For example, maybe there’s a consistent issue with a trucking lane or something along those lines. Or maybe carriers have challenges when it comes to hiring labor in certain markets. Without the ability to see these trends, we can’t make decisions that could potentially improve our supply chain.
Question: What’s the best way to ensure communication is flowing freely?
Felix: In an ideal scenario, you want to partner with an integrated 3PL—meaning, a single provider that offers services spanning multiple points of the supply chain. We’ve seen some nightmare scenarios when it comes to multiple providers, including lots of back-and-forth finger pointing about whose fault it was if a truck arrives late, for instance. Partnering with a single company is your best bet because there’s only one company and a single point of contact responsible for making sure that communication happens and the supply chain is flowing.
Related Resource: Vital Steps for Building a Proactive Supply Chain in 2024