There are many techniques and theories when it comes to warehousing. Companies can choose between operating between single centrally located warehouses and operating multiple warehouses throughout a region or a country. In multiple warehousing systems, companies spread out to cover territories and be easily accessible to customers. It offers many benefits as compared to single centrally located warehouse systems. There is plenty of debate regarding which is the most efficient and effective. Ultimately, it all comes down to the satisfaction of customers. Depending on the customer satisfaction, it is more appropriate to have multiple warehouses.
Imagine a customer trying to get a product to the middle of Texas when there is only one single located warehouse in New York. While the product would eventually get there, would you lose anything by having it take long? When you have multiple warehouses, there are clear advantages that make you reliable to customers in the long run. From saving on transportation costs to making clients happy, the use of multiple warehouse system just makes sense.
Here are the advantages of having multiple warehouses:
- Quick delivery: with multiple warehouses, delivery time can be cut down pretty dramatically, meaning that you can move more products at a quicker pace. Instead of customers waiting for products to arrive from one single centrally located warehouse, their orders will be shipped quickly from various warehouses, meaning their purchased products arrive quickly.
- Low transportation costs: because products will spread out over a larger area when you have multiple warehouses, the cost of delivering purchased products significantly decreases as warehouses are in the vicinity of customers.
- Easy accessibility: instead of having your products in one place, they will be in multiple places, meaning that if a customer needs a product, the entire process becomes much easier. Having your products spread out means having easy access to multiple warehouses rather than one centrally located warehouse.
Other advantages of multiple warehouses are:
- Elimination of middlemen in between manufacturers and ultimate consumers.
- They avail the advantages of bulk purchasing.
- Uniformity of prices and quality of products sold is maintained at all warehouses.
- If one warehouse has short supplies, then it can be immediately replenished from another warehouse so that customers can easily access products.
- There are low operating costs hence prices are not increased to cater for operations.
- There are flexibilities of operation in such warehouse systems.
- If one warehouse is closed, customers can still access products in other warehouses as compared to single centrally located warehouses where if closed, there are no more operations.