How to Build & Run a Thriving Warehouse | Warehouse OS Series Ep 01

It’s time to upgrade your warehouse operating system 😎

Join us on a journey across the US as our CEO, Aaron, drops in to a few of our ShipHero warehouses to uncover the people, processes, and technology that power our fulfillment network. We won’t hold back…in this series, we’re sharing the method we use to keep customers happy and run profitably - the key to running any 3PL at scale.

Be warned - there’s no fluff here. You’re going to want to have your pencil sharpened and notebook ready.

Video Transcript

[Hehehe] Let me get the mic on. Oh, I got the mic on. [Snaps fingers] I’m going to start over! If you're working to take your warehouse from good to great, you're going to want to watch this series. Hi, my name is Aaron Rubin. I'm the Founder and CEO of ShipHero. You might know us for our warehouse management software, and we do have the warehouse management software that is the most popular and highest rated for eCommerce brands between five and $100 million a year revenue and the 3PLs that serve them. What you might not know is we operate over a million square feet of warehouses in North America serving mid and large sized eCommerce brands. I'm in one of those facilities today in Jacksonville, Florida. You'll hear from the general managers in our buildings across the United States, as well as people on the floor and our remote ops team as we show you what they do to satisfy our customers needs and run a profitable at scale 3PL.  Doing what we do is nothing magical, right? Anybody can take a product, put it in a box and give it to a carrier. It's really about the relationship that you build with those customers and being able to follow through with what you say you're going to do. If you have stragglers or orders that are still sitting and waiting, coming in the following morning, that's kind of when you want to start looking into that second shift or replen. You know, you don't want slow starts in the morning, you want to come in, you want to rock and roll, because that first hour or two of your shift is what's going to make that shipping day. Finding those issues before it stops production on the floor. Through the queue management side of it, it's ensuring that each facility has work consistently throughout the day so there's no downtime. You don't want to over bill your clients either. They don't like that very much. So because this is your source of truth, meaning this tracking system, if it's incorrectly tracked because of the human element, you need to make sure that you're checking both ends of those transactions so that when someone's out of the building but still, quote, billing hours, you don't want that to happen. Everything in a warehouse should have a flow. It comes in the building. It comes out of the building. Right now, our pickers start at that end of the building and they finish all the way at the far end, and they put their totes, their carts completed over in this area. However, speed is a key factor here as well. If I want to get the numbers out the door, I need some people who are efficient and know how to work with some speed. It's a trial and error basis. We see who's out there. We see who looks good, we see who works efficiently and things like that. And we'll bring them back here to the bulk department. As soon as they hit our docks, we open these purchase plans and we basically go from looking and seeing what product we have, how many we have back ordered or whatever the case may be for that specific shipping plan. We basically receive the stock in and make sure whether it's allocated to our RSP, RSC, whatever receiving staging location that we have. Then from there we put it into overstock. We're excited to take you on this journey. We're going to go through several of our buildings and show you the best practices we use that will hopefully help you take your existing warehouse that's running well and make it run even better.

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