In the bustling world of ecommerce and wholesale supply chains, warehouse optimization is king! How you organize your warehouse can make or break your order fulfillment process.
Picture this: you’ve got a warehouse full of shoes
Organizing by size seems like a no-brainer if you’re fulfilling direct-to-consumer (DTC) orders. But what happens when your business grows, and you need to fulfill large wholesale orders and juggle multiple business models under one roof? Suddenly, that meticulously organized warehouse becomes a logistical nightmare.
Many warehouse operations teams face this challenge. Optimizing for one business model often means sacrificing efficiency for another. Let’s explore this dilemma and how to strike a balance without pulling your hair out.
Size matters: the DTC approach
Let’s take a journey through our hypothetical warehouse. On one side, we have the DTC inventory management strategy, where shoes are organized meticulously by size. This setup is a dream come true for fulfilling individual orders to eager consumers. A Size 9 sneaker for John in Wisconsin? Aisle 3, third shelf, no time wasted.
However, as we pivot to wholesale clients’ needs requiring complete size runs for retail operations, your warehouse layout quickly turns from a dream to drag. Time and labor costs balloon as workers zigzag through aisles, piecing together orders. In this approach, ecommerce fulfillment becomes a wholesale bottleneck – and vice versa.
Related: What’s your operational maturity for DTC? Take the challenge.
For DTC, speed is everything
When buying direct, customers expect their orders fast. They want the exact size, color, and style they ordered. To meet these demands, organizing your inventory by size makes perfect sense. Shoes are grouped by size, allowing pickers to grab the correct product quickly.
But what happens when a wholesale order comes in?
Wholesale customers don’t want just one size; they want entire-size runs, often in large quantities. Suddenly, your well-organized warehouse becomes a scavenger hunt, with pickers running from one end to the other.
The result? A slower, labor-intensive process that erodes your efficiency.
The wholesale perspective: bundle up
Conversely, optimizing your warehouse layout for wholesale supply chain operations means grouping products by style and bundling entire size runs. This setup allows for quick and easy order fulfillment for wholesale customers who need large quantities of product in one go.
It’s a dream for wholesale orders, but a nightmare for those going after the booming DTC market.
Imagine a customer ordering a pair of shoes in size 9. In a warehouse optimized for wholesale, that size 9 might be bundled with every other size in that style, making it much more complex and slower to locate and fulfill that single order. What was once an efficient setup for wholesale suddenly becomes a bottleneck for DTC.
Historically, those size runs might be ‘fenced’ and hidden from the order management system (OMS). If your direct order pickers grab a Size 6 from a run, you risk a wholesale order being picked incorrectly, triggering order errors and chargebacks.
Related: How much can you save with an OMS? See for yourself!
The solution: an omnichannel balancing act
So, how do you strike the right balance?
Is there a way to keep DTC fulfillment and wholesale operations running smoothly without compromising efficiency?
Enter the OMS omnichannel fulfillment platform
An OMS can lower your shipping costs and reduce chargebacks even if you only have one facility.
Deposco’s OMS software and DOM (distributed order management) supports both DTC and B2B/wholesale operations. Uniquely built to work with our WMS, our flexible OMS allows you to optimize your warehouse layout for both models simultaneously to accelerate your omnichannel strategy.
An OMS platform also provides options for executing multiple storage approaches in the same warehouse, making it very easy to optimize your warehouse layout for both.
By leveraging advanced algorithms and real-time data, our OMS system dynamically adjusts your picking and packing strategies based on the type of orders coming in.
- Need to fulfill a DTC order? The system directs pickers to exact item locations, ensuring speed and accuracy.
- Got a big wholesale order? No problem. The platform bundles the sizes together, reducing labor and maximizing efficiency.
With this level of flexibility, you can have your cake and eat it too—efficiently serving DTC and wholesale customers without the headaches of one strategy compromising the other.
The great warehouse layout debate
The great warehouse layout debate doesn’t have to end in frustration. By leveraging the right technology, you optimize for DTC and B2B/wholesale, keeping your warehouse operations running smoothly and your customers happy.
So, the next time you’re pondering whether to organize your warehouse by size or style, remember with the right OMS platform, you don’t have to choose. You can have the best of both worlds.