Ron’s Thoughts: Reduce Receiving Time at Your Furniture Warehouse by 30%

About the Author:
Ron Sellers

Ron Sellers, co-founder and chief revenue officer of TrueCommerce ecUtopia, is a technology advocate and leader for the home furnishings industry. With more than 25 years of industry-related experience, he offers significant expertise as a committee member of the Home Furnishings Association (HFA) and sits on the Executive Advisory Council for WithIt, a women’s leadership development network for the home and furnishings industries. When Ron is outside of the office, he can be found on his Harley Davidson cruising the streets.

What furniture retailer wouldn’t want to cut receiving time and associated labor cost by 30%? The real question is, how to do it?

With integration and automation from ecUtopia, this level of improvement in receiving efficiency can be straightforward for furniture retailers to accomplish.

In a traditional receiving scenario, a truck pulls up to your warehouse with 100 boxes on it. The boxes are unloaded and staged, while you pay someone to stand on the loading dock with an envelope full of RFID labels. He or she examines a box, identifies the SKU number, finds the corresponding label and applies it to the box. And so on to the next and the next and the next…

In the “30% time savings” scenario, all the boxes are pre-labeled with RFID numbers. So there is no need to stage everything or match SKUs and labels. You can just scan each box as it comes off the truck.

Meanwhile, as the warehouse crew is putting the scanned boxes away, the products they contain are already “visible” to your salespeople and available to be sold. You can also enable cross-docking with your ecUtopia system—saving not only time and money but also “touches” on the furniture.

With ecUtopia, you can use pre-labeling with RFID numbers with suppliers of any size. For example, say you send a $30,000 PO to Ashley Furniture. Your PO includes the RFID numbers for each line item you are ordering. As Ashley Furniture fulfills your order, they automatically import the RFID numbers from your PO into their ERP. Then when they’re ready they can simply print out the RFID labels, put them on the boxes and ship them.

Or maybe your supplier is a two-person shop making decorative ducks in a garage in backwoods Maine. They would check their ecUtopia portal to get your PO, then use the portal again to print out the labels and put them on the boxes full of ducks that you ordered. When the truck pulls up at your warehouse, you can scan the boxes, put them away and start selling ducks—again, in 30% less time.

If you’d like to streamline receiving and cut labor cost through pre-labeling with RFID numbers, let’s talk.