The warehouse at the quiet, industrial part of the town
started as, literally, an empty concrete shell, with no furniture, no goods, no
ventilation, and no sign of life.
Truckloads of item and upholstery shipments later, combined with more
than 12 hours of continuous work by more than a dozen cheaply hired foreign moving
men, the new warehouse is finally looking like a warehouse, with the shelving
racks, desks, and chairs arranged in their proper positions, and shifted items
ready for unpacking.
It is hard to believe that the whole operation practically
occurred overnight from Friday to Saturday, with the company logistic staff
sacrificing sleep to supervise the entire move of the warehouse from the
complete opposite side of the town in the cover of eerie darkness. And on Monday, mere couple days since the
packing of the old warehouse began, the logistic operation is expected to be
back in full operation, as if the massive move did not happen at all.
Such is the reality of the day-to-day on-the-ground
operations of “logistics management,” the uninterrupted flow of which ensure
items purchased by customers are sent out on time, new items are properly
registered, and in essence, make sure that the start-up e-commerce company
maintain its revenue and good reputation are not damaged by its actual
performance. And, a small team of less
than 10 men, making up less than 5% of the entire company staff, squarely
shoulders this entire responsibility.
For anyone with previous, but exclusively non-logistic
aspect of a commercial enterprise, witnessing the massive warehouse move is a
further reinforcement of the utmost significance logistical organization is for
the entire company. Especially as the
company attempt to continue growing its user base and revenue, having a smooth
logistical operation with little bottlenecks for delays and mistakes is
essential to ensure the continued viability of any marketing efforts for
expansion.
Furthermore, one needs to consider the fact that any
reliable data for company performance is actually generated by the small team
of logistic operatives as they go about their daily business of processing
hundreds of orders everyday. Amid the
non-stop receiving and sending out of purchased items for customers, the
logistic team actually ends up tallying just how successful marketing efforts
have been, noting just how many extra orders made became real sales with real
revenues.
Yet, the hard work and significance of logistics seem not
highly recognized or even appreciated within the company as a whole. For most of corporate staff that spend
majority of time analyzing customer preferences and purchasing trends, the
warehouse is considered somewhat of a “black box” that they can mindlessly
input orders and expect more shipments as a straightforward outputs. They seem not to be willing or able to
comprehend why this simple input-output mechanism can go wrong so often.
Such mentality is particularly evident when marketing launch
new promotions with considering at all issues of actual implementation. The time-tested linear processing procedures
of logistic operations, time and time again, are torn apart by the “special
requests” made by the marketing and customer service teams, while with good
intentions of catering to the needs of certain specific segments of customers,
end up ultimately working against the holistic mission of efficiency
improvement.
At the site of the new warehouse, with its distinctively
non-corporate-looking environment despite the steadily progressing
transformation into a processing space, more than a few staff, even those with
long-term experience in logistics, would secretly grumble about the substandard
working conditions. Perhaps some of our
corporate staff should experience our on-the-ground difficulties before setting
us with unrealistic expectations of operational perfection. For them to come take a look at the warehouse
may be a needed first step.
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