Ryan Lynch

It's a mixed forecast for material handling stakeholders. On the one hand, prices are improving and equipment wait times are coming down. On the other, economic hardships and labor challenges continue to cloud the future.

How can facilities stay ahead? To find out, we went straight to Jason Laws, who estimates he and his team have spent countless hours talking with 10,000 material handling executives. In the process, Laws, TFS's Market Development Manager, has not only gained deep insights into the issues facing facilities, he has crafted solutions that increased uptime and saved money.

Welcome to the first edition of The Supply Chain Roundup! Supply Chains, Logistics, and Material Handling are changing so fast it’s hard to keep up. There’s a firehose of information blasting at us every day--so we’ve curated the most interesting and valuable things we read into this monthly roundup. If you’d like to sign up to get it monthly via email, please subscribe!

Is your business booming? Congratulations! That is, unless you manage material handling and you’ve tried to order new assets to handle the onslaught of orders, and have gotten the news about long lead times.

If you’re under constant pressure to cut costs and increase uptime (and who isn’t?), you may feel like you’ve exhausted every pricing option. What you may not realize is that you’re probably overlooking hidden costs. We’ve put together 10 mistakes that are likely increasing the costs of your material handling program. Take a look!

We talk to a lot of supply chain, manufacturing and distribution execs, and we know a lot of them got to where they are by being control freaks (and we mean that in the nicest possible way). After all, when you take your job seriously, it can be hard to trust that an “outsider” will buckle down, let alone understand enough about your operations to actually improve certain things.

Today, you probably outsource many critical, but non-core parts of your operation, such as delivery vans, long-range semis, MRO products, and more.  This is probably because you’ve seen the cost benefit--and you understand the added soft benefit of allowing your people to focus on your core business, instead of these ancillary enablers. After all, semi-truck experts are likely to know a heck of a lot more than employees whose job descriptions don’t even mention the word “semi-truck.”

As we all know, the pandemic has taken a toll on many businesses. If you’re facing pressure to slash costs, you’re not alone. And, if you’re like most execs, you’ve pored over your supply chain costs, looking for cost-cutting opportunities. It’s great that most companies have eliminated waste from their line items—unless your annual review rests on cutting costs. Then, it can feel like you’re trying to squeeze blood from a stone. The upside is that there are effective ways to take the fiscal sting out of the supply chain--you just have to know where to look.