Rethinking racking
Rethinking racking If there’s a word to describe the state of the supply chain over the past two years, it’s disruption. From the pandemic to labor shortages, to black swan events like a ship blocking the Suez Canal and the war in Ukraine, nothing has gone as the industry expected. With no end in sight, companies are rethinking how they operate going forward. From the supplier to the manufacturer to the customer, many links of the supply chain have come up short of late—and the fallout continues. One piece of the fallout is a current slowdown of the former popular approach of lean warehousing/just-in-time (JIT) warehousing. While e-commerce is demanding that products be available and ready to ship in rapid fire, too many companies have been burned since 2020 with having too little inventory on hand. There’s a bit of a return to onshoring to keep production closer at hand. There’s an even bigger return to holding safety stock and larger amounts of inventory. As a conseque...