The Christmas/Year End holiday season is a big one for the entire world. Even if you do not partake in the religious festivities, many importers and exported the world over gear up for it, months in advance, to ensure that the holiday/Christmas logistics season plans in advance to ensure you delays or issues. However, with the current status of the world and the ongoing impacts of COVID-19, many disruptions are expected.
One of the most obvious disruptions expected when planning for Christmas logistics would be shipping delays, be it with port closures, capacity issues and scheduling delays. Ensuring your supply chain processes runs smoothly will enable you to achieve your Christmas logistics goals, however, it is important to adapt to the changing and volatile environment that the global logistics industry has become.
By planning for Christmas logistics ahead of time and adapting to the state of current affairs, you can plan ahead. That is, you can amend your buying and supply chain processes, adapted to change. If you are allowing pre-orders, do so thus allowing you to ensure specific stocks are ordered way in advance. You can also market your products for customers to opt buying online especially with non-essential retailers closing down and moving directly to online only. Optimizing your inventory can go a long way as well by organizing it well, and using ABC and PARETO Analysis, and also inventory/cost sales analysis. Further you can opt to reduce your minimum order quantity to avoid on unnecessary warehousing costs should you assume, that items will not sell fast enough. Should you run out, you can enable a wish list/pre-order with an approximate lead time estimate.
With the rising ocean freight rate hike and its knock-off effect on shipping costs in total, you can expect that this will hurt your supply chain costs and cause your goods pricing to also change, for the higher. Adapting to the changing game and finding more resourceful means of planning for Christmas logistics to further longevity is a good business practice. Whilst the pandemic has been a bane to many industries, it has revolutionized the way business and trade operates.
Further if you adapt your strategic management to ensure that despite the supply chain you are able to sustain your business by adapting other business functions to get the word out and change the buying patterns. Whether its opting for a regional logistics partner such as Transco Cargo, or choosing third party logistics provider, to bringing up your lead times to ensure there are no delays, there is always a solution. What would you do?