Consumer Goods Logistics Blog

Billions of dollars of product are lost each year to product and packaging damage in the grocery industry. Product damage is a particularly severe profit drain for wine and spirits manufacturers trying to keep a fragile product intact during the distribution journey from the bottling plant to the store shelf or doorstep.

What country drinks the most wine and spirits in the world, per capita?

Drumroll, please….

According to Alcohol.com, it’s Belarus, followed by Lithuania, Grenada and the Czech Republic.

What 3PL distributes the most wine and spirits in the U.S.?

We’re not sure, but this year Kane Logistics will ship about 26 million cases of wine & spirits for its customers, building on our 30-year strategic focus on wine and spirits logistics. We recently sat down with two of KANE’s top operators for wine and spirits logistics – Richard Reilly and Mike Kelly – to discuss the top challenges associated with this type of product. Following are 7 priority challenges that they identified.

Other than inventory, your logistics workforce is the largest expense in your distribution centers, eating up 50–70% of the warehousing budget. It’s why managing and reducing labor-related expenses is a top priority for just about every logistics executive.

At Kane Logistics, we’re proud that our associate retention levels with our top 10 customers is 80.2%, compared to the industry average of 53.9% (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics). Here are 10 logistics workforce management strategies that work for us, and may work for you.

Back in 2005, the Tyler Texas Area Builders Association built a large home from the ground up in less than 3 hours. At the time, it set a record. Here's the video.  

It was a promotional effort to publicize the Association, but the overarching message was the importance of planning. While the build itself took just 2:52 hours, it was the product of months of meetings – among engineers, architects, builders, landscapers, tradesman, and project planners – to spec out every last aspect of the project. 

After inventory costs, labor is your biggest cost bucket in the warehouse. If you can increase efficiency on the warehouse floor, it’s realistic to drive labor costs down up to 20% – even without automation. That money drops straight to the bottom line.

Labor savings are a product of reduced time and touches, and there are dozens of strategies you could pursue to achieve these objectives. But one strategy – warehouse slotting – is both under-rated and under-utilized.

Much of the cost and complexity in CPG supply chains happen post manufacturing.

Think about it. You might have one product – a potato chip – that gets packaged in dozens of ways. Historically, this final packaging has been handled as a discrete supply chain function by contract packaging companies. But an increasing number of CPG companies are recognizing the huge cost advantages – as much as 30% of combined warehousing, packaging and freight costs – of performing secondary packaging in the distribution center.

Each month, school district superintendents from Lackawanna County in northeast Pennsylvania meet to discuss a variety of issues common to them all – things like curriculums, budget management, and security. Typically, they meet in a conference room at the Greater Scranton Chamber of Commerce, however last month they met at KANE headquarters in Scranton, where there was one more topic on the agenda – jobs.

If you are a user of third-party logistics (3PL) services, you know that 3PLs tend to have a metric for just about everything – productivity, accuracy, timeliness, costs….

3PL metrics are used as a barometer of performance and to inform continuous improvement programs. But should these same numbers be used to measure the success of your 3PL/Client relationship?