Before e-commerce sales consumed 8.5% of retail sales, warehousing could be a much simpler affair for many companies. You would bring products in by the truckload, store them until orders were p... View More

This article originally appeared in our July/August issue If UPS and FedEx follow their 2017 timelines, general rate increase (GRI) announcements for 2018 are on the horizon. No matter when they are announced,... View More

In part one of this series, we covered the many factors that are creating new challenges for inbound parcel management. First is the dramatic increase in the volume of inbound parcels that organizations

While the general population is working on their tans and vacationing in tropical locations, July is the month that online retailers should start preparing their stores for the influx of holiday order

Technology is constantly evolving, and many people are eager to obtain the latest electronics. Electronics are relatively fragile and often expensive, so it's important to understand how to safely pa... View More

Not so long ago, businesses saw no great need to put much effort into managing inbound parcels and mail pieces. However, in the last few years the inbound parcel receiving landscape has changed... View More

“Amazon doesn’t talk about what they’re doing - they just do it,” says Markus Ellenbeck, head of StartupLogistics, LLC in Austin, Texas. Judging by the progress Amazon has made... View More

Well, it happened. Just as we predicted during our presentation at last year’s Parcel Forum, a major carrier has finally imposed a Peak Season Surcharge (PSS) for 2017. UPS’s announcement... View More

In a previous article, I referenced business intelligence and its importance in managing small parcel supply chains. It wasn’t merely for the sake of audit and service recovery, but for the sake... View More

In 2016, nearly half -- 43 percent -- of all online retail sales in the US went through Amazon, thus fueling industry demand for two-day shipping. This growth in e-commerce has contrib... View More

Bulk parcel flow requires singulation (i.e., each parcel is uniformly separated, spaced, and aligned) before entering a downstream automated sorting system. In the post and parcel industry, effi... View More

Many supply chains have been struggling to control costs and maintain budgets under the new dimensional (DIM) calculations put in place by FedEx and UPS. Those changes, introduced as part of the... View More

Each organization is unique in the products they carry, where their customer base is located, what their customer expectations are for lead times, and how they ship their products to their custo... View More

Editor's Note: This originally appeared in the May/June issue of our sister publication, Mailing Systems Technology, but as more shippers are including the USPS in their carrier mix, we thought this... View More

As the population ages and regulatory requirements increase, a recent study by Deloitte forecasts global health care spend to reach $8.7 trillion by 2020. The logistics behind this spend are cos... View More

Twenty years ago at this time, Seinfeld aired its famous “yada yada yada” episode — and all of us gained a new catchphrase for how easy it can be to skip over or miss crucial elements... View More

In many past installments of PARCEL Counsel, we have focused on a carrier’s liability for loss and damage to cargo. However, in this issue, we will look at how improper packaging, loading, blo... View More

The subject of warehouse management systems (WMS) is something that should be evaluated by every DC operations team, every year. The IT team should be involved, but more importantly, it’s the... View More

There has been a lot in the news recently about the expanded use of robots. How would robots work in the parcel business? The real answer is that technology is already a key driver for productiv... View More

Opdimizer Is The First Defense Against Increasing Dim Charges Increasingly, the gap is widening between what shippers expect to pay for parcels and the charges they are surprised to find on thei... View More