Festive Family Dinner: Celebrating the Holiday Season with Delicious Food and Togetherness

20. November 2024

Stay Stocked and Stress-Free: Grocery Solutions for Holiday Season

The holiday season is one of the year’s culinary highlights, bringing back beloved flavors and traditional dishes. These delicious foods are even better when shared with family and friends. To prepare for these festive moments, customers stock up on everything they need to make their celebrations special. However, grocery shopping during this time can be a challenge. Shoppers often face long checkout lines and out-of-stock items, leading to multiple store visits and more time spent waiting in queues.

Grocery

Holiday Retail Challenges

The holiday season is equally challenging for everyone working behind the scenes in retail. Ensuring the right products are available in the right quantities across all stores is a complex task. Fresh products, which are in high demand, need constant replenishment and must be maintained in perfect condition to meet customer expectations. Additionally, seasonal items like turkey, ham, cranberry sauce, and baking ingredients must be distributed in large quantities. This surge in demand stretches distribution centers along the supply chain, often requiring additional manpower to keep operations running smoothly.

Efficient Grocery Supply Chain

To maintain and enhance market share during this critical period, supply chain and warehouse experts in grocery retail need to address the following questions:

Efficient replenishment: How can stores be restocked efficiently across all temperature zones to meet daily peak demand?
Stock management: How should inventory be managed across the entire supply chain, including distribution centers and in-store stock?
- How can shrinkage be avoided, especially with perishable goods or seasonal items that cannot be sold later?
- How can out-of-stock situations be prevented to avoid disappointing customers and earn loyalty?
- How can stock levels in stores be ramped up, for example, by shipping non-perishable items earlier and storing them in advance?
Labor management: How can additional labor needs be effectively handled?
Optimized delivery routes: How should delivery routes be adjusted, given that larger store orders reduce the number of orders that can fit into one trailer?

Many of these challenges are closely tied to the performance and capabilities of distribution centers. Automation plays a crucial role in effectively addressing these demands.

At TGW Logistics, we work with leading grocers to design warehouse automation systems that effectively manage the complexities of peak season demands.

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FullPick: Engineered for Peak Performance

TGW Logistics’ FullPick system is a highly efficient mixed-case palletizing solution that addresses peak season challenges with a three-step approach: design, prepare, and smoothen. Each solution is tailored to meet the specific needs of retailers during peak seasons, offering two common strategies:

Efficient Design

FullPick integrates manual picking operations for fast-moving items. During peak seasons, these SKUs can be removed from the automated system and picked manually, freeing up capacity and improving overall system performance.
After peak demand subsides, these items are reintegrated into the automated system.
This approach is cost-effective but requires additional staff for manual picking.

Performance Design

These solutions are built to handle peak season demands with additional performance capacity, ensuring even rare errors are manageable.
While this approach is more expensive, it requires minimal additional staffing.

Key Features of FullPick

All FullPick-based solutions share the following core characteristics:

Tray-based mixed-case palletizing system with multi-unit loading: The system becomes more efficient as more units of an item are transported on each tray. This increases the likelihood that a tray will be fully emptied with each order. As a result, transportation is optimized, and system performance is better utilized.
Cube utilization optimization: Our pack pattern generator ensures that load carriers are densely and store-friendly palletized, optimizing use of trailer space and supporting efficient in-store replenishment activities.

Fullpick

Preparing for Peak Success

Installing an automated solution is key to peak season success. With the right technology in place, efficiency is significantly enhanced. However, thorough preparation is also crucial. TGW Logistics’ On-Site Services teams ensure that systems are optimized and ready for high performance well before peak periods, minimizing downtime and maximizing reliability.

As the holidays approach, TGW Logistics works closely with retailers to smooth out operations together. This includes strategically ramping up throughput by shipping long-life items to stores several days before peak demand. When these goods can be buffered in-store, it reduces the workload on automated systems, preserving capacity for time-sensitive products that cannot be pre-stocked.

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