While techniques to maintain and track inventory under a roof are well-established and somewhat ubiquitous, outdoor storage still lags in performance as many businesses ignore some of the basic rules that they followed when setting up their warehouse. While the warehouse space might be packed with advanced scanning and conveyor equipment, high bay racks served by aisle pickers and perhaps even robots, outdoor areas tend to suffer from lack of attention to the same level of precision and order that is valued in the warehouse.

In this article, we will discuss outdoor storage by differentiating between simple bulk storage facilities and yard management facilities, which are used to store containers, trailers, and trucks.

Before You Buy – A Must Read Before June 30^th

Earlier this year, Verizon Wireless announced the following:

“beginning July 1, 2018 (this year) dealers will no longer be able to activate any CDMA data only devices, and any non HD/Volte phone devices, including swaps.”

This means exactly what is says – any 3G device you have purchased but not yet activated will not be able to activated after this weekend. This is part of a larger CDMA phase-out being executed by all carriers over the next two years.

On a recent visit to a global metalworks facility on the East Coast, our team discovered something that forgers and steel operations, which are known for a work environment dealing with extreme heat, have in common with cold storage and frozen operations. 

At first glance, you would assume that there is nothing these two environments have in common. After all, no one packs a bag the same way for a ski vacation and a beach vacation. And if challenged to identify a common solution between an ice cream storage facility and a rolled steel mill, we’d probably be hard-pressed to think of one. But there is a big one.

What they have in common is Gloves.

As we all know by now it’s past time for everyone to migrate off your Windows OS into an Android environment. (Click here to know why.)

While devising a plan for replacing most of the more common devices is straightforward, there are a couple of additional factors to consider regarding your rugged devices when making your transition to Android.

A Gartner Report from last year is a good guide that we will summarize today.

If you are somehow NOT yet planning your migration to Android, please read this article before continuing!

As we’ve noted on multiple occasions in this blog, there are some big advantages that businesses are starting to discover about Voice Collection. While we have walked through a lot of the potential processes that can be improved and the “how to” of how it works, it is perfectly reasonable that many of our readers have asked “Does it really work like that?” or “Is it REALLY that easy?”

Buried near the bottom of this year’s “The Future of Fulfillment Vision Study” from Zebra is an interesting section on the future of supply chain technologies. This week we’re going to share some of the high-level insights they shared and go a bit more in-depth on a few of them.

While initially underwhelming the logistics world in the 90’s, RFID has been growing exponentially in the last five to seven years. With good reason, it has led to many businesses taking a second look at the technology and wondering if it has indeed, reached a point where it should be replacing barcodes.

Go Fish? Not so fast!

In 2003, investigators in Australia solved an illegal poaching operation using RFID chips. The fish (which were already caught and on shore) had RFID chips inserted into them, and when the unsuspecting fish-burglars took the bait and made off with the “catch,” they soon found themselves up to their gills in legal trouble.

While this early innovation was a creative way to use RFID on a fish, since that time others have been looking at more positive ways that have a more productive objective, though with the fish remaining as in demand as ever.

Today we are sharing a recent interview with Jim Donahue, Advanced Mobile Group’s resident expert on Voice Collection, who has some thoughts about trends we should expect to see in 2018.

When it comes to some areas in your warehouse, big improvements are often hard to come by. This is especially true for typically labor-intensive areas like picking, or other areas where the work is irregular in timing and cumbersome, like Receiving.