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Warehousing: Key Partnership for Distributors

Warehousing: Key Partnership for Distributors

Having top notch industry supply chain partners is important to running your business safely, efficiently, and effectively. If you don’t have high-value partners, it makes it that much more difficult to ensure that you make a profit, grow your business, and put more people in your community to work. Part of that equation for many chemical distributors is using a warehouse to store products until they are ready for distribution to customers. Unfortunately, sometimes decisions are made that make sense at the time but ultimately create headaches costing your business time and money.

Many issues can lead to you being unable to fill your orders on time: lost or damaged inventory, mismanaged asset allocation, personnel issues, inadequate safety and security procedures, regulatory concerns, and so much more. The good news is that there are ways that you can work with your warehouse to make sure these issues don’t become a problem.

You can form a safety committee to ensure fewer warehouse incidents. You can schedule regular conference calls with your warehouse to make sure you are both on the same page about your products and orders. Internally, you can establish accountability and give your staff a sense of ownership over warehouse interactions. These ideas and much more are ways that your warehouse can work more efficiently and effectively for you, and it is worth exploring some of them with your storage provider to ensure they are doing the best job they can for you.

In that same vein and recognizing the potential problems with warehousing, NACD is launching a new initiative this year to identify warehouses that can help avoid some of the problems I mentioned earlier. They are members of NACD who are committed to Responsible Distribution and go through some of the verification process as members, which in turn takes a huge burden off of you as you go through the verification process. We plan on posting this collection of warehouses on our website in the coming months so you can easily and efficiently access a list of warehouses to help store your products so you can focus more on finding customers and growing your business.?

Having effective supply chain partners like warehouses is crucial to the chemical distribution industry. It’s imperative that you work with your warehouse to make sure they are providing the most effective services they can, so you can provide better service to your customers.