Five Essential Tips for Negotiating with Suppliers
A good negotiation means research, preparation, and building a clear strategy for the negotiation itself, well before you need to consider storage issues, such as shelving systems for your goods. Use these practical and proven tips for a successful negotiation.
Set Fixed and Flexible Objectives
Before you (and your team) enter into the negotiation process, draw up a table of your objectives. Where possible, set out a range rather than a specific number, and think about how flexible you could be about compromises being made across different objectives.
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How to Find the Best Overseas Supplier
With the Australian dollar at an all-time high, sourcing goods for sale from overseas has never been more attractive. The internet has made finding and connecting with overseas manufacturers and traders much easier but the process remains complicated and importers should take care when dealing with overseas parties. These are the key steps not to miss when you set out to find an overseas supplier.
1. Research and Sources
The internet is a great place to start as it gives you virtually unlimited reach in connecting with potential overseas partners. However, you need to choose your suppliers with caution for the same reason. There’s no way of verifying the information supplied to you unless you visit suppliers in person or make thorough reference checks. You may choose to do these further down the line, and well before you start getting organised with the other elements of your business like warehousing or storage options, such as pallet racking.
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Six Steps to a Highly Efficient Warehouse
Many businesses are happy as long as the orders are rolling out on time and customer deadlines are met. However, in many cases the efficiency of warehouse can be drastically improved, which in turn can reduce unnecessary expenditure. From shelving systems to software and order profiling, these are six practical steps to an even better warehouse management system.
Product Profiles
Use stock keeping units (SKUs) to profile your items. Your SKUs will probably be changing according to product life cycle or the seasons. Therefore, it’s important to keep track of the highest volume orders and set out your warehouse to optimise pickup. This will reduce pickup and order fulfilment times. Depending on how much product turnover you have, you might need to update these product profiles every six months, or even more frequently.
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Four Strategies for Starting Import/Export Businesses
The Australian import/export industries are worth hundreds of billions of dollars every year. Behind these enormous figures are large multinational companies, medium sized enterprises, as well as small businesses. With lots of research, a clear business plan, effective relationship building, and lots of persistence, anyone can start an import/export business provided they can find the right product and match it to a market. From starting with a great product or market, to good logistics and storage, such as ensuring that you have adequate shelving systems, these are four practical strategies for import/export success.
Find a Product or Find a Market
Whether you’re bringing a product you’ve already found to a market, or finding a product to meet a demand in the market you’ve identified, the key reasons for importing or exporting are usually one or more of the following three:
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Five Steps to Wholesale Business Success
While maintaining good relationships with retailers is one of the key to succeeding in the wholesale industry, there are other ways to boost business growth and turn your company into a business success story. From building relationships, to using great shelving systems, to watching margins, use these five proven strategies to enhance the performance of your wholesale business.
1. Commitment to Your Product
Finding products you can be passionate about helps you stay focused and motivated during the drive to distribute. Very few products actually do sell themselves. If you’re indifferent about your goods, then your lack of passion will show and it may be that much more difficult to demonstrate its relevance and potential in the retail market. To sell a product, you have to know how it can bring value to others.
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Checklist for Choosing a Self-Storage Facility
If you’re travelling, moving to a smaller place, have commercial goods that need to be stored, or have a need to pack away your things and keep them in storage, you’ll want to choose a self-storage facility that will keep your belongings in a good condition and provide enough security to safeguard them from theft. From shelving systems to security measures, these are the criteria to look out for when choosing a self-storage facility.
Security and Safety Features
Security is obviously a key factor when choosing a self-storage facility. There’s probably nothing worse than getting your valuables stolen or destroyed by fire due to lax security and safety.
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Seven High Density Storage Solutions for Warehouses
Using high density storage solutions can multiply your storage capacity many times over. The best storage tools are stacked style palletised or non-palletised storage options for your warehouse. With these shelving systems, you can free up more than half of your warehouse space and improve movement, safety and productivity in your organisation.
Palletised Storage
Palletised storage facilitates pickups with forklifts, pallet jacks, front loaders, or other jack devices and makes moving heavy stacks easy. Some of the most common options for palletised storage are as follows.
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Key Benefits of Warehouse Management Systems
Warehouse management systems are commonly used to improve efficiency and record keeping. They can enhance customer service levels and assist with management decision making, for example, on designing storage requirements and shelving systems. Here’s a quick guide to the major benefits of warehouse management systems.
What is WMS?
Warehouse management systems (WMS) are a combination of technology and process used to improve warehouse efficiency and functions. A good WMS will record everything from the beginning to the closure of the cycle, covering all the stages from supplier receipts to customer delivery. It will then allow you to record, access, and analyse all the stock and inventory movements and review any information or communications that occurred during the product delivery cycle.
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How to Save Money for Your Business
Running a business is a constant balancing act in so many ways…but never more so than when it comes to balancing profits with expenditures. Obviously, the aim is to have low expenditures and high profits. Simple, right? Wrong. As anyone who has ever owned a business can attest to, the ins and outs can get very complex very quickly, not to mention the ever-mounting list over overheads that seem unavoidable in order to run an effective business. Everything from getting the right shelving systems to store inventory to marketing costs and basic running expenditures come with a price tag that needs to be weighed against the potential profits they’ll create, which is why we’ve compiled a list of tips and tricks for saving money on the running of your business.
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How to Choose the Right Storage System Provider
Choosing the right storage solution for your business is an important and individual choice. Depending on your specific requirements, you could need a simple solution like a new shelving system or a more complex, comprehensive warehousing solution and getting it right is crucial. While the equipment itself is of the utmost importance, finding the right supplier–that is, the right company who can address your storage needs—is a big part of the puzzle as well. Here are a few tips for choosing the right people!
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