Webinars

The pandemic fundamentally shifted the retail landscape, accelerating the need for supply chain transformation. How we receive, store, and deliver goods has changed dramatically, and this disruption has affected our business’s back-end operations and profitability.

Riaz Husein, CEO of Profit Chain Consulting, Billy Linder, president of USSI, and Andrew Koenig, president of City Furniture, explain what supply chain strategies it takes to maximize profits in today’s changing world.

OUR PANEL OF EXPERTS

Riaz Husein – CEO & Founder, Profit Chain Consulting

Profit Chain is a business advisory firm specializing in the furniture Industry. Riaz has helped retailers and manufacturers capture growth opportunities and maximize profits by enhancing their supply chain, logistics, warehousing, transportation, customer service, and final-mile delivery operations for over two decades.

Bill Lindler, Jr. – President, United Steel Storage Inc. (USSI)

Bill has an Industrial Engineering degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology and has vast experience in complex systems, sustainability, and proven solutions. USSI can help you identify opportunities and improvements in your warehousing, helping to reduce warehouse costs and increase operational efficiency.

Andrew Koenig – President, City Furniture

Andrew serves as president of family-owned City Furniture, a top 100 retailer. City Furniture operates 20 stores in South and Central Florida, plus 13 Ashley Furniture stores in parts of Florida. Andrew has applied the principles of Lean Thinking to his operations department bringing about major improvements in productivity, reduction of safety issues, reduction in quality-related issues, happy customers, and improved morale.

Key takeaways from this webinar:

• Businesses are adding more technology to streamline processes to keep back-end costs contained and lower expenses.
• Leveraging technology for inventory management and utilizing the tools you already have to their fullest capabilities can help maximize profitability.
• Learn where you need to make changes by extracting data and analyzing your point-to-point movements to make sure the efficiencies are there.
• Be mindful about the space you currently have so that better management of your cubic feet within the warehouse can maximize efficiencies.
• Demand planning and sales forecasting is key so you can effectively match the proper labor force to the flow of goods.
• To help mitigate container expenses, get creative and utilize a 3rd party warehouse or consolidate and share expenses with others.
• Use your brick and mortar to your advantage and do what the online-only retailers can’t. Promote your locally available inventory that customers can come and see, and touch in person.
• Retailers are testing delivery of boxed goods and delivery handling instead of deluxing in a warehouse for some products to see if it helps streamline their processes.
• Invest in your staff. Cross-training back-end staff can help with the ebb and flow of demand.
• To retain employees, better scheduling and flexibility are often more important than compensation to improve employee’s quality of life.
• Within every process there is waste, so start the lean journey with your employees on the front lines providing feedback and suggesting process changes.
• Show that you value your teams, by encouraging and empowering them to use their problem-solving skills to suggest changes or improvements.
• Make ideas and changes fun and competitive by using gamification and incentivizing team members.