- Kim Wren
- Director of Business Development at SkuVault
Sponsors:
- Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!
- Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation Software
Bio:
Kim Wren is the Director of Business Development at SkuVault, a cloud-based Inventory & Warehouse Management System. With over 20 years of eCommerce experience, Kim has held many roles. She has done everything from multi-channel eCommerce seller herself to launching products and brands, to leading an award-winning customer service team.
Kim currently works with partners, consultants, affiliates, and 3PL’s to assist in the growth of SkuVault. She has a passion for Small-Medium eCommerce businesses and is always available to answer questions & assist etailers to enrich their businesses.
Links:
- http://www.skuvault.com
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/skuvault
- https://www.instagram.com/skuvault
- https://www.facebook.com/SkuVault/
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
Welcome to the Business of eCommerce the show that helps e-commerce retailers start launch and grow their e-commerce businesses. I’m here today with Kim Wren. Kim is a director of business development at SkuVault, a cloud-based inventory and warehouse management system. I’ve known him for a while. She’s an expert in everything skew vault inventory lid, where I was managing unrelated. So I asked her in the show to talk about if you’re a retailer and you’re looking at setting up a warehouse, what are some do’s? And don’ts, what are some things you should definitely be looking for? And just some random tips that can really help you in the initial setup and save you some time in the long run. So it’s a super interesting show. I hope you guys enjoy it. Leave any comments, any likes, always appreciated, and we’ll get onto the show and his interview with Kim. So again, how are you doing today?
Kim (00:57):
I’m great. How are you today, Charles? Doing good.
Charles (01:00):
Glad to have you on the show. It’s
Kim (01:02):
Hi. I appreciate it. Thank you for giving me the time. Yeah.
Charles (01:04):
Yeah. Well, inventory management, I feel like there’s something I haven’t spoken about very much on the show. And from working directly with quite a few retailers, everyone kind of does it, but it’s not, it’s just not a topic you kind of see discussed very often and I’m not really sure maybe, cause it’s not like, you know, there’s like optimizing ads. There is the boring side of it, but it is what comes down and makes, you know, makes a lot of these businesses work. So it’s just interesting that it’s not something we duck into very often. It’s kind of excited to get into the details. So director of business development, ski vault ski vault is a WMS right where I was managing system.
Kim (01:44):
We are we’re WMS with IMS and WMS built together. We like to make sure that people understand we do both. But there’s a lot of crossover in the industry. Everybody has their hands in inventory, some way shape or form. We just go really deep in the warehouse and do a lot in the warehouse as far as routing workers, making sure that people can find things and keeping your warehouse organized in addition to all of the inventory functions as well.
Charles (02:09):
Yeah. I think that’s the thing when everyone kind of has the inventory management, right? Like everyone has a shop in Congress and it’s inventory, but when you actually start talking about warehouse management, there’s a whole different layer of that, right? Like the barcode scanner is, and like people moving around and like what pallet is in row 36. So all of that is like actually, you know, managing the warehouse. Right. That’s what I stopped.
Kim (02:31):
Making sure that you’re getting the people in the right place. Yes. Using the barcode scanners, making sure that you’re picking the right item and the right quantity and getting it to the right station for shipping. So that you’re, you know, we integrate with the shipping software so that you’re using that QC and the shipping software as well. And making sure that you’re getting that out when you’re going. You know, when we’re, when we’re looking at working with you guys, we’re looking at whole loads to get out to companies that, that may need that service to get everything over to their resellers and their suppliers. So there’s a lot of different ways that skew vault is involved in the backend. Basically, if you need to find something you need to do.
Charles (03:13):
Yeah. It’s definitely one of those things. Once you basically go to outside of inventory management, being like some boxes in the corner, you actually, when you start talking to new retailers about setting up, so let’s say someone doesn’t have warehouse right now, they’re doing, you know, they have some, and I had this one point around e-commerce side and I had an office partner and I would literally stock stuff in our office. And at one point the box was so high. They were going to tip over and like crush us. And he’s like, you know, he got to stop. So at what point, when you’re talking to a retailer and they’re like, all right, I have that box problem. They’re going to tip over. And you know, flat me one day, I want to move into a proper warehouse. Like what do I do next? What do they kind of look at from now?
Kim (03:55):
So when you start looking at, I need to get into a warehouse I’m, you know, maybe. So I think the first thing you have to do is you have to identify what are the warehouse in e-commerce we can be dealing with people who are operating out of a basement, a garage, a bedroom, all the way up to somebody that’s running maybe 500,000 square foot warehouse and everything in between. So what is your warehouse? It can be anything it’s, anything that holds your inventory and Wendy, what do you do when you need to start setting that up? Well, we need to organize it. You need to be able to find things you need to get proper shelving in there. You don’t want to stack your boxes one on top of the other, because you’re constantly moving them to get to what you need to you want to make sure that you’re getting good organizations set up like shoving set up in rows and set up with locations and making sense logistically out of what you’re doing in that warehouse.
Kim (04:50):
So if you’re looking at a warehouse that’s a few thousand square feet, maybe you’re looking at like a 10,000 square foot warehouse, you’re going to have several rows of shelving and you’re going to want to name those and get those locations. So you have row one, two, three, four, whatever, and then you start naming shelving, and then you’re putting items in there and you’re putting them on your shelf. But what you want to think about when you’re doing that is what kind of picking you’re doing as well. Because the example you gave of where you’re stacking things up, usually what you want on those top shelves are it’s that overstock the items that you don’t have to get to all the time, you want your eye level to be your picking area. And you want your very low on your very high to be overstock overruns extra items, slow movers, whatever, but you want to make sure that you start out with that good organization, setting up areas in your warehouse for your shipping, for your receiving, for your returns.
Kim (05:45):
Making sure that it’s organized in a way that once you get it done people can find things and it’s not all in your head. We see that a lot with small business owners where they’re building things and they start out in your head and they don’t put it on paper and they don’t, they don’t get a system and they don’t get things set up, right. And then they need to hire somebody. And now they’re in the middle of a system with no way to explain it to somebody. So start early with getting everything set up correctly and getting it, getting it in your warehouse correctly, and look for those proper ways to get that warehouse set up.
Charles (06:24):
Today’s episode is sponsored by drip, drip. It’s a world’s first e-commerce CRM and a tool that I personally use for email marketing and automation. Now, if you are running an e-commerce store, you need to drip a try. And here’s why drip offers one-click integrations for both Shopify and Magento. There’s robust segmentation, personalization, and revenue dashboards. To give you an overview of how your automation emails are performing. One of my favorite features of drip is the visual workflow builder. It gives you a super easy way to build out your automation world visually and see the entire process. It lets you get started quickly, but also build very complex automation roles. It’s powerful, but also easy to learn. Unlike a lot of email tools that offer the same type of automation to get a demo of drip today, you can go head over to drip.com/boe that’s drip.com/b O E. Now onto the show, when you say I’m receiving. So do people usually have, like, what is the process when you’re checking a new product? So a container comes in like in that day is always like the hectic crazy day when like, you know, you’re trying to get stuff off probably somewhere that’s basically blocking you’re blocking everything, a rack, like what kind of happens. Is there any kind of best practices there
Kim (07:38):
They can have? I mean, it really depends on the size of your operation, I guess. So, so if you’re looking at an average size operation, maybe a small business, that’s doing say $4 million a year, $5 million a year, somewhere in that area, generally, they’re going to have a receiving area set up. So, and hopefully they have a receiving dock so that when things come in, as trucks are easy to empty and easy to get into the warehouse and, and to get off of the pallets as well, or at least get the pallets in there easily. If you have that area set up, then it becomes a little less chaotic because it’s sitting there and you’re over there with your scan guns, we hope. And in you’re using your scanners to receive everything. If you’re using a system like skee-ball, then you can pull up your purchase order and you can see what was ordered and you can start receiving against that purchase order.
Kim (08:30):
So that as you’re receiving things, you can be scanning those in with the barcodes that are entered into your Steve ops system and entering those counts correctly. So if you’ve ordered 10 of widget, one, two, three, and you only got five, your purchasing, department’s going to know that by looking at what was received at that point. And as a business owner, sometimes you don’t necessarily your receiving department to see what you ordered. So there’s ways to hide that. And there’s ways for you to allow your receiving department to just receive against a purchase order without them knowing exactly what was purchased. And those are some,
Kim (09:13):
Some companies have trust issues. And, and so they get worried about whether the receiving team is going to receive things properly. If everything’s going to go in the warehouse correctly are they going to stop counting at 10? Are they going to get very concerned when only eight come in? And it was 10 because you do have those people that like to over-perform as well. And, Oh my God, we ordered 10. We only got eight. I have got to take this immediately and go talk to purchasing Greg that’s, that’s wonderful, but you’re right now, your job is to be receiving this entire pallet and let’s get that done. Let’s get that into the system. And then let’s hand this off to purchasing and let’s let them do their jobs so that they can follow up with it. So there’s a lot of different ways and reasons why people might not want the receiving team involved in what purchasing was doing.
Kim (10:05):
If they do, and many small businesses do want that purchasing or that receiving team involved, you can do that. And then they are comparing and they’re looking and they’re making notes as they go through and saying, we didn’t get these, or we got them damaged. Or you know, we, we got an overrun and maybe you have an agreement with your supplier to get overruns. Many suppliers do sell that way. So your agreement might be that you order a minimum of a hundred of something, but when our manufacturing, if there’s an overrun of up to 10%, you agree to take that on your purchase order. And that does happen with some manufacturers. So when they’re receiving, you want to make sure that you’re getting every single count in, hopefully you have a dedicated area for it, so that it’s not so chaotic. And it’s not in your way. If you don’t, then obviously you want to get it received as quickly as possible and get it put away. And that’s where Steve all can kind of help with getting everything in there because you can slot it into where it belongs very quickly. Or you can just get it into an empty location if you’re using some sort of a dynamic system within Steve-O or within your warehouse. So that you’re just using empty slots to get your product into. And nothing has a definite home.
Charles (11:21):
That seems like one of those big benefits, right. Of having some sort of management software. Cause you talked to these retailers that don’t, and you’re like, how many, you know, how many of widget aid you have in the warehouse? And they’re like, eh, not really. Like, it’s kind of just like, and like, that’s like the worst scenario where you don’t know, maybe there’s, you know, 150 or maybe there’s actually like one and you have no idea and just kind of like running out and when they can’t find any, they order more
Kim (11:47):
What do you do? Yeah.
Charles (11:50):
You always, you talk to people who are in this today and like, how do you get out of that when you’re in that hole, do you have some sort of system where people can do like an auditing and at least come up with like I, and the people doing that, I’m assuming as infrequent as possible, right? Like hopefully you have these checks in place. So when stuff comes in the door, units come in, they’re counted there. So you don’t have to run a stock check every week. You know, it can be like a yearly thing, hopefully.
Kim (12:17):
Yeah. If you’re using, if you’re using a scanning system you know, the big thing in a warehouse is you want to avoid typing anything that you can, because whenever you start typing something, you open yourself up for error. When you’re using a scanning system, that scanning system is making sure that you get the correct item in and out the door every single time. And if you’re scanning every item, it’s the correct quantity every single time. And even if you have to get to the point where you want to count a hundred and you want to just enter 100, instead of scanning all 100, we get it. Nobody wants to stand there and scan a hundred of something. That’s fine. As long as you’re going through. And you’re double checking and you’re making sure that your quantities are getting incorrectly. You know, as far as, as far as your inventory and ordering, when you have, when you don’t have something or worse ordering, when you do have something that’s where WMS comes into play.
Kim (13:10):
And IMS comes into play very, very heavily because you want to make sure that the stock that you’re ordering is the stock that you need. It’s cashflow. If you’re, if you’re letting yourself get to one of something and it turns out that it’s a hot seller and we are having the issues that we’re having right now with supply chain, and it has to come from where where’s it coming from China, is it coming from across the United States or, you know, are you in New York? And it’s got to come from California. So it’s going to take a week to get there on a truck or ups or however you’re getting it, or is it coming from a boat from China, you do not want to get down to one. You need to be able to set thresholds so that you know, when to place orders and that you’re getting those orders placed as quickly as you can so that your inventory is constantly flowing.
Kim (13:57):
I mean, if you’re an Amazon seller, you know, if you run out of stock, you lose the buy box. And if you lose that buy box, there’s a real good chance. You may not get it back for a while. So that’s something that you want to really be careful about. If you’re a brand selling on your website and you run out of the item that you’re selling and somebody really needs it, they’re going to your competitor and they’re buying. So you don’t want to lose them off of your website. You want them to be able to constantly purchase from you. So you want to make sure you’re keeping your inventory levels correct for the item that you have, but you also want to make sure that the items that you have are showing in your inventory, because it is a catch 22. You don’t want to have somebody say, Hey, how many pens do we have that are, you know, design a and you’re like, I don’t know, maybe 10.
Kim (14:46):
Well, we just got an order for 200. Do we have it? I don’t know. Let’s go dig around the warehouse and look, no, let’s, let’s have a system in place where you know exactly what you have, you know, exactly where it is. And you can get there very, very quickly. It makes picking orders and getting orders out the door, very efficient. And with the arena that we are living in with COVID last mile is going to kind of stink this year. And we all know it. And so you need to get those orders out the door as quickly as possible, because just that one day could make a difference between somebody getting an item in time for gift giving or not getting it. And you’ve ruined their Christmas because you know, I’ve been there. I was a, I was an e-commerce seller and I probably ruined Christmas for people that I didn’t get something to them on time. So you don’t want to do that. You want to make sure you’re creating that great client experience by ensuring that you’re getting things out the door faster. And the best way to do that is to make sure you know, what you have, make sure you’re listing what you have, make sure the quantities are staying correct and know where it is. So you can go and get it there, quickly pack it, ship it out the door.
Charles (15:54):
Yeah. It’s one of a sign of the times in 2020, one of our most requested features. Backorders and no one’s ever talked about backorders before. It’s usually something that just like, Oh, we don’t do that. And now it’s like, no, no, no. We have to support them to share like back, like that’s kind of the new thing. And yeah, like you said, the buy box, you know, they don’t like backorders no, no one likes backorders it’s, it’s just a sign of the times. And if possible, you never want to get there. Right? You want to be able to look into the future and say, okay, we’re selling this many, every 30 days, we have a lead time of 90 days. So we need to order, you know, four months and it was bad. So you need to really have like an understanding of how many you have and how many you’re going through every month to get some sort of concept on when you need to order again.
Kim (16:35):
That’s exactly right. And, and with a warehouse and an inventory management system, you do get that. You have that reporting with Steve-O we have a way for you to put in thresholds of when you want to order so that we notify you when an item gets to your threshold for placing your order. And then you can just pop it into your purchase order and send that off to your supplier. So that everything’s, everything’s pretty automatic. So you’re getting it sent through very, very quickly and getting that information because you can send that PO right from Steve-O and then get that out there. But, but that is, you know, it is a big deal to make sure that you’re ordering a timely manner. And especially now, when I know things were very, very slow in the spring and we’ve started getting orders back into the United States, we’ve started getting ships back into the U S from overseas, but I hear their space being fought for on their ships. I know a lot of e-commerce sellers are having, they’re struggling with making sure that their containers getting on the ship and, you know, they’re fighting against each other to make sure that, that they get on that ship. And then what’s that doing? It’s running up the cost of shipping too. So we’re seeing increase in cost of freight shipping and ocean freight shipping. So controlling that inventory and making sure that you’re getting everything quickly can kind of help keep those costs down as well.
Charles (17:54):
Go into the holiday season. Are you seeing in 2021 next year, are you seeing this continuing or is this Stein to kind of level off at some point or directions ahead in right now?
Kim (18:05):
The supply chain issues. I think that we’re going to continue to see some issues. It’s, you know, I hear people saying we have shortages and I don’t really think that it’s shortages as much as its supply chain. I’ve I actually was talking to a grocery manager for Kroger, our local grocery store recently. And he mentioned that, you know, part of the reason that they have empty areas in the store. And I think this goes everywhere is that they have limited amounts that they can order. So an example of the groceries, he can only get X number of cases per week on his grocery order. And that has to include all the groceries that fall into that grocery category for that particular store. And so what happens is if he has a hot seller, that is, you know, I used Halloween candy as an example, if he has to get Halloween candy and, and that happens to fall in grocery.
Kim (18:58):
And I don’t know if it does, but that may take away from being able to get macaroni and cheese or to be able to get beans. And so then you might see an empty shelf for a week. And so what happens, everybody’s panicking? Oh my God, there’s a shortage of Mac and cheese. No, there’s not a shortage. We have a supply chain disruption, and I don’t think that’s going to correct itself all that quickly because we’ve got to get, we’ve got to get those, those shipments in from overseas. They stopped for a very long time and making up two, three, four months worth of shipments coming back is not an easy task. It’s it’s actually kind of comical. If you look at some of the pictures that I’ve seen recently on social media of some of the ships, the cargo ships that are coming across the ocean and the stacks and stacks and stacks of cargo bins that are on there. It is amazing. I just don’t even know how they don’t say, but it’s going to take awhile. So it’s, I think we’re still looking at another six to eight months to get the supply chain caught up. Hopefully it means people buy American a little bit more too.
Charles (20:07):
Yeah. I think the lead times is really the thing, right? It’s just the lead times have gone. Your lead times are two months before and now they’re six, eight, the number you just need to look so much further into the future. And you can’t just be saying like, you know, looking out the window at the warehouse going, yeah, it looks like we should order some more today. This needs to be like, well planning, you know, you’re planning out in the spring, you planning out the fall. Now it’s a whole different thing. So right now, you know, you should be thinking of spring of next year. This isn’t,
Kim (20:33):
You really should. Christmas, Christmas this year should have been planned for June. It’s already said and done at this point. If you’re not, if you’re not writing for peak season at this point, well, you know, I’m sorry, but you probably should have been. And you really need to just say, okay, I’m going to do everything I can right now to get through this and keep notes, you know, watch what your pain points are and then address those after the first of the year. So that, so that you can kind of take care of those so that you don’t continue to live with those pain points constantly because e-commerce is not going to die down after the holidays. People shop differently now, and it’s going to continue and you’re going to continue to experience those pain points. If you don’t notice what they are. It just so happens that you might notice it a little bit amplified because you know, we’re in peak season. And so you see just a little bit more, but fix it, you know, fix it in January you know, muddle through in November and December, and then fix it as soon as you can. Yeah.
Charles (21:34):
Have you ever seen, and we work in a lot of drop shippers here that kind of have this model where they don’t carry an inventory. So like initially they go in thinking like no warehouses where as a bad, but then you kind of run to the saying, well, well I do get some returns, so I got to do something with them. So you start basically creating your own, you know, returns warehouse. And then at some point you see, okay, maybe, you know, X, Y, Z product, they’re running some sort of promotion on that. I can get that at a great deal, but I have to buy a minimum quantity of a hundred or 500 units. Okay, let me pick up a few of those. So you start almost like slowly becoming a warehouse as a drop shipper. Do you have to kind of see this model and like, is there a way to kind of make that transitional easier? Because usually that’s like the awkward in between where you didn’t ever plan to actually hold inventory, but somehow now you’re looking at your garage and you’re like, I can’t park my car in a game anymore. What do I do?
Kim (22:26):
I think there is, I think it does go back to getting organized in the beginning. And, and I do think a lot of businesses and especially e-commerce businesses start that way. They start out with the drop shipping model or they start out with that just-in-time model where they’re ordering and then just getting it in. And that model is really screwed up right now. So, you know, if you’re, if you’re operating on just in time right now, you probably are, are experiencing a little bit of angst and a little bit of worry, so that’s difficult, but I think if you’re going from drop ship and I think a lot of companies have a I think it’s a hybrid. I think it’s a little bit of everything. They do some drop shipping. They do some self fulfillment and, and maybe they do some just-in-time as well.
Kim (23:11):
I know when we operated our e-commerce business we did all three. So, so we actually warehoused our hot sellers and anything that needed to go out very quickly. We always made sure that our stock levels were kept correct. And we got those out quickly, but items that we needed to sell that were not hot sellers, and we’re just gonna take up space in the warehouse. We often just drop ship those directly from our manufacturers or our wholesalers. And we just set up those relationships so that they could take care of that for us. And we got into less of the dropshipping and bringing it in and more of the warehouse. It was a pain point because we did have to figure out how to operate a warehouse and how to organize the warehouse and how to set it up. Thankfully in our case, we had a warehouse manager that had done this for awhile.
Kim (24:03):
So, so that helped. And, and we had experience in large warehouses with machines and selling machines. We were also an authorized dealer for an inventory type machine. So it helped to know what the nuts and bolts were to go in. But I think that a lot of people don’t get that. And even today occasionally when I’m out speaking and I go to like conferences where you have smaller sellers, something that I hear, that people, it blows their mind. When I talk about it is I have this speech or this thing that I do called don’t play hide and seek with your inventory. And I start talking about how to create a location within your warehouse, and it just blows people’s mind that they should have a location. And it’s such a simple thing because it’s just an area on your shelf where you put a bag and you’ve called this shelf three and section a, and it’s just an alphanumeric code that you’re putting in there.
Kim (25:02):
And you’re saying, okay, now I have section three, a and all that means is it’s the third, the third section of shelving and it’s shelf a on there, and it’s an aisle one. So maybe I’m one, three eight is now my location. So setting those up and knowing that, that scheme and how to set that up, it’s really a big deal. A simple Google will help people understand just Google, how to do it. And it does help you. Why is that such a big deal? It helps, you know, where everything is. No, I get it to me. It’s such, it’s just second nature to do it. But it helps, you know, where everything is, even if you’re not using a skee-ball type WMS, even if you’re operating off of a spreadsheet, you need to make sure that you have a location because how do you know where anything is?
Kim (25:55):
Even if every piece of inventory that you have is in a bin, number your bins and, and give them millions of numbers and not just names and numbers, but give them locations. If your garage is a four car garage and you’re using it as a warehouse and you have a bunch of bins in there and you start numbering them one through 50, and you need to get into men 38. Well, where is it? So, you know, take off areas and name your areas in some way, shape or form, or put up shelving and put shelf tags on them and make some sense out of it. By saying, I won. I’ll do all three. I have for sure. One, two, three, four, it’s going down your rows and getting your sections. I, I personally have a small business bill that sells on eBay.
Kim (26:42):
I just sell stuff on IVIG. It operates out of my basement. And I have a full warehouse system set up for my basement. So I have literally, I mean, people are always forward. My husband runs it and people are always floored when they look at it, it gets, we have aisles one, two, three, and four. And and then he’s got everything named, but he, he knows how warehouse management systems work. So he set it up and we know where everything is. When we have a sale, he can go, he can pick that item and he can have it off the shelf and over to his shipping area in a matter of 20 or 30 seconds, it doesn’t take any time. There’s no searching for it. There’s no delay. And then when you’re coming back in off of that drop shipping type scenario that you were doing, or you’re going to create that hybrid, you got to organize it. You got to figure out where it’s at. You got to know where it is. And because before you know it, you’re going to go from having 10 products to 200 products. That’s the thing on your head.
Charles (27:43):
It’s a thousand square feet, and you can just sit there and you can view, you know, from your chair, you can see the entire warehouse. You kind of get a sense of, okay, that’s all those are over there. These are on the side. It’s easy. When that thousand goes to 10,000 and you’re out sick and you have to, or you have to get in some seasonal help or anything. And you basically just now like traffic copping people around the warehouse. And I know you go, you go there and you spend your day doing that. It gets, it can get bored, boring real quick.
Kim (28:10):
It can, and, and you you know, one of the biggest mistakes that we see small business owners make is that they don’t want to they want to do everything themselves. They, they like to, they’d like to be the master of everything. And often they aren’t, they, but they’ve created all these great processes for their business, but they can’t grow it. Because they’re the only ones that own those. And so it’s harder to hire somebody because you didn’t write your process down. You didn’t organize yourself well enough to start with. And so what happens if you want to go on vacation who’s going to do your shipping. Are you just going to shut your warehouse down while you’re gone on vacation? Because you don’t have any, you have no scheme. You have, you have no organization to your warehouse. You have no system set up.
Kim (29:01):
You have no way for somebody else to come in, pull your orders down off of eBay, Amazon, Walmart, your website, wherever they’re coming from, and then create some sort of a pitch for it. Go and get them and very easily, get them back out the door. And that’s where you need that, that WMS, that IMS, to be able to keep that organized for you so that you can very easily get somebody else in there. You draw a map and say, Hey, this is what, this is what my map is. This is a one, two, three, four. And here’s how my locations lay layout. And now someone can very easily come in and do this for you.
Charles (29:31):
Yeah. And that’s a good thing about even, and maybe it’s only twice a year, right? It’s your busy season. It’s black Friday, the holiday. It’s one of the times where it just, you can’t do it. Right. And you need a way of just like, let’s print out the picklist and let’s just hand. And you, you know, and for people who haven’t seen them, you get this picklist. It’s literally like a roadmap of go here, pick up these three things, put them in this bin and you basically just can, and some of them are organized based on like, you do this, and then they have steps. And by the time you get to the end, you’ve done everything you turn around and you’re pretty much done. And you keep taking them and just going off and doing these little routes around the way house and you come back and drop them in a box and they go, and once you generate those, you can just print them out, hand them to someone else.
Charles (30:14):
And they can just do a lap around the warehouse, come back around and just keep doing that until they’re done. Without that, you’re pretty much just like, you know, poking around in boxes. You’ll look, it’s kind of picking this box thing. And I dunno, I dunno. I think you’re like looking on the top shelf and that’s like the last place you want to be when you come to like, you know, the holidays, a black Friday, or just anytime, while you’re under the gun and it’s late and you have to get them out. And the ups guys coming at the end of the day and you’re like sweating so
Kim (30:42):
Well. And when you look at it, you know, from a scaling point of view, when you start getting into those where you’re shipping out 500,000 orders a week you, you not only need that roadmap because you need for your people to be able to find your things, but you need to be able to route your workers. You don’t want to create bottlenecks within your aisles. So if you’re running a warehouse that has, I don’t know, maybe 20 Isles, you did not want all four pickers going down aisle one to start your day. So you want to be able to create picklist in a very smart manner. So you want that intelligence going into creating that pick-list and very easily saying, okay, let’s start this one here, let’s start this one here. And let’s start this one here. And then you want to sneak around the warehouse.
Kim (31:27):
You don’t want them running all over place. You want to make sure everything is going in order. And a lot of that goes back to your initial setup. If you’re setting up your warehouse, right, to begin with your warehouse management system or even your shipping system or whatever you’re using to create that pick list is going to help you be able to create that a better way, because with skee-ball you can set that up so that it takes you in order. Or you can set that up. So you may want to set your pick list up to pick all of your multi order items first, and then put all your single item orders second. Or maybe you want to pick all of your hot sellers. First. Maybe you have one item that you sell. You shipped 200 of every day. And so you put those items on its own picklist, but you need to be able to have an intelligent way to create those piglets, to get people out into the warehouse so that you’re moving them around and not sending everybody to ship to the first section of showing the first row of shelving, the first section of shelving in the first shelf, because now you’ve got what three, four people standing there trying to get into the same thing.
Kim (32:32):
Not a good idea, not a good spend of time. So, yep.
Charles (32:36):
I like it. It’s been super helpful, I think. Yeah. I think a lot folks don’t realize this is just something, this is one of the few things where you should lay the groundwork, I would say earlier on, right. There’s some things we can over-optimize and it just it’s like too much, but like when it comes to the warehouse, like you can really start small and it actually helps at the small level, just knowing what’s there checking returns back in knowing, okay, we got a few things in and at least having that inventory. So it’s not just in your head and you’re not manually going back to shop by and like keying it in. You can actually just check it in. There you go. It’s all automatic. And then it just kind of grows up with you as a retailer. So as that thousand goes to 10,000 square feet, ideally, right. We can just kind of expand the warehouse, expand what’s in the warehouse and it kind of just keeps growing.
Kim (33:22):
Yes. And it’s, I think it’s really helpful. I’ve been I’ve been with Schiavo a very long time. So I I’ve been there since startup days and, and many of our early customers who are still with us they may have been what you know, they’re a small family business. They didn’t, they didn’t have aspirations of growing to 30, 40, $50 million a year. They want to be able to support their families on this and, and they’re doing it. And they started with Schiavo when they first were getting their business going, and maybe they were operating out of their garage and they moved into a small warehouse, but they’ve stuck with us because it’s important to have that they’ve grown with our features, but they were so thankful when they started with us early. And they made sure that they got that warehouse set up and that they got those basics in there.
Kim (34:07):
And there was somebody to kind of guide them and say, Hey, this is how you should set a warehouse up. This is what it should look like. And, and give them a little bit of guidance on making sure that they’re getting everything in there correctly so that we’re telling them, go barcode your warehouse, go put those barcodes on your warehouse. So you can very easily scan that barcode right there on your warehouse shelf. And, and you’re doing everything very quickly and very easily. And then it makes it easier to grow, or it makes it easier to just operate and not grow if that’s what your choices. But again, you can go back to taking those vacations. You can take a day off. Your kids can take over your business for you. If that’s what you want it to be, or you can have grandma come in and do some shipping, you know, it works
Charles (34:49):
Awesome. It’s a good place to end it with grim. I do have the shipping. So if people want to thank you for coming on, and if people want to find, you kind of learn more about skew vault, we’ll put some links anywhere you’d recommend or anything you guys are currently working on.
Kim (35:04):
We are currently working a little bit more. We have just released some more serializations. So people who are electronic sellers take a look at us again. We have a way for you to drill down to a single individual item and make sure that you can track all the way from, you know, those cases coming in to that one iPhone that’s going out. You want to make sure, you know, which one went to Susie over in Peoria, you know, because we’ve got that serialization in there now. I think you’ll see a lot more on that and on lots and on first in, first out next year. So we’re awesome.
Charles (35:38):
All right. Thank you very much for calling. I appreciate having you. Thank you. I appreciate it too. [inaudible].
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