If you are reading this, congratulations! You’ve managed to select a warehouse that meets your ecommerce fulfillment needs, and you’ve reached out to schedule an on-site visit.
Then it probably hit you — you don’t know much about warehouses. And if you don’t know how a good warehouse looks on the inside, how could you possibly judge or ask the right questions?
If you’re nervous about looking clueless during your site visit, you need not fear. At OTW Shipping we run some of the most efficient fulfillment warehouses in the industry. We’ve created a handy guide telling you all the things to look for when you’re on-site, and questions to ask post-visit.
Questions to prepare for your 3PL ecommerce warehouse site visit 📝
You’ll want to collect details like:
The names of the managers you’ll be talking to (go ahead and check LinkedIn if you have time)
Who owns the warehouse? (Do they rent all or a part of the warehouse? Do they own the entire thing?)
How many clients they are currently running out of their warehouse?
What types of products do they specialize in?
What security measures do they have in place?
What percentage of their employees are W2 and what percentage are temps? How does that change during Q4?
What to do during your warehouse site visit
🔎 Note the warehouse conditions
Plenty can go wrong in a warehouse if there aren’t proper safety features installed. If a warehouse skimps on safety, there’s a good chance they might be skimping on your orders too.
As you walk around, ask yourself:
Do the storage areas look neat and tidy?
Are all products off the floor and in pallets or on shelves?
Are pallets wrapped?
Are they using modern shelving technology or spindly frames from the 1950s?
Speedrack West has a nice article on the different modern shelving types you should probably see.
Inventory that is not stored well is difficult to pick and pack efficiently, risks breakage, and poses a risk of injury to warehouse employees. If you see poorly stored items, make sure to ask about it.
Ask to see where returns are processed. If the return area is just a pile of t-shirts balled up on a pallet on the floor, that might tell you the provider can’t do them properly.
🚶Walk through the processes
Start with an understanding of their receiving process. How are they verifying and logging inventory into the system? The more manual the process, the more likely there is a clerical error.
Ask to observe their standard pick-and-pack process.
Is the process paper-based, or is every unit getting a QA scan when being picked or packed? Pick and pack accuracy is crucial.
How is the best box size for your order decided? Are they using optimal sizes? This greatly impacts your postage costs.
Are their processes efficient? Slow pick and pack means higher costs for you.
Are work tables cluttered and dirty?
Are employees consistently having trouble with the system?
And once that’s done, you may not be able to watch a truck loading but you can at least see how goods are placed into the gaylords (these are the large, sturdy cardboard boxes used for shipping and storing bulk items).
If you need to brush up on your terminology, we have a big ol’ article on pick & pack fulfillment you can check out.
Take lots of pictures
Try to take a mixture of close-up and wide-view shots of the warehouse for your team to review. You want to capture photos of elements like:
Surrounding area (is the area secure)
Bin and racking storage
Inbound/Returns areas
Staging area
The idea is to use these as a reference to show to any other decision-makers on your team and help with any other questions that pop up post-visit.
💬 Chat with an employee
The best way to know how any business really operates is to talk to the people doing the work.
If you get the chance, ask to speak to warehouse employees privately about their jobs and the location. If something feels off or sketchy, it probably is. This often goes unsaid, but disgruntled employees are much more likely to damage your products or even steal them in the worst cases.
Some things to chat about with employees:
How do they like the WMS they’re using?
What did their training process look like?
How did they find this job? (Can reveal information on hiring practices)
If they could change one thing at the warehouse, what would they change? (This can reveal potential flaws in operations).
What’s the craziest thing they’ve ever seen while working at a warehouse? (This could reveal unsafe practices at the current employer).
It can be hard to determine everything you want to know from a few casual conversations. However, extrapolating what you hear from employees with other information will help you get a better picture of how the sausage gets made as they say.
What to do after your warehouse site visit: Follow up
After the site visit, you should sit down with your team and discuss the information you acquired during your visit and your impression of the warehouse operations. Next, you should come up with a final list of questions for your potential provider.
These questions could be anything that came up based on what you saw during your site visit or a factor that slipped your mind in earlier email chains and in-person conversations.
Follow up with the warehouse provider to thank them for their time and ask any final questions before you make your decision.
You can visit our warehouse at OTW anytime
If you want to impress customers with a great delivery experience, you need a fulfillment partner that runs a clean and efficient operation. And if you want to see how a well-run 3PL warehouse looks, you’re more than welcome to swing by one of OTW’s locations at any time.
We designed OTW shipping for growing e-commerce brands that want to keep order fulfillment running like a well-oiled machine.
If you’re interested in touring one of our warehousing and fulfillment centers, get in contact with us today to set up a meeting.
And if you’re looking for a new fulfillment provider, know that when you ship with OTW, you get:
99.99% order accuracy
Transparent rates and custom quotes
2-day ground shipping to 90% of the US
Access to a Slack-like channel where you can chat with any member of our team directly
State-of-the-art warehouse management software
Partnerships with some of the best e-commerce growth agencies in the business
And much more
Send us an email and let’s start shipping!
תגובות