Many warehouses also must handle returns, which run about 5% in retail. This will become a major function within any warehouse supporting e-commerce, where returns run 25–30%, comparable to those supporting catalog sales.
Another trend is for warehouses to assume more value-added processing (VAP), which is additional work beyond that of building and shipping customer orders. Typical value-added processing includes the following:
Such work may be pushed on warehouses by manufacturers upstream who want to postpone product differentiation. By postponing product differentiation, upstream distributors, in effect, see more aggregate demand for their (undifferentiated) product. For example, a manufacturer can concentrate on laptop computers rather than on multiple smaller markets, such as laptop computers configured for an English-speaking market and running the latest version of MS Windows, those for a German-speaking market and running Linux, and so on. This aggregate demand is easier to forecast because it has less variance (recall the Law of Large Numbers!), which means that less safety stock is required to guarantee service levels.
At the same time value-added processing is pushed back onto the warehouse from retail stores, where it is just too expensive to do. Both land and labor are typically more expensive at the retail outlet and it is preferable to have staff there concentrate on dealing with the customer.
1 回答
3.7 其它流程
很多仓库还必需处理退货，比如零售就大约有5%的退货。而电商仓的退货会有25-30%，与电话邮购相当，退货处理将会其主要的流程之一。
提供更多的增值服务（VAP）也是仓库发展的趋势之一，这些服务是在响应客户订单发货之外的，通常有以下这些：
加或贴标签(例如，纽约州要求药店中的所有商品都贴有价格标签，许多经销商在仓库中拣货时作)。
纹姓名或修改(例如，这些服务由服装目录和电子邮件商家Lands End提供)
重新分包
齐套(组合几个SKU包装形成新的SKU）
延迟装配、贴牌(如许多电脑设备制造商在产品包装出货时，在仓库完成组装和包装)
开发票
类似于那些希望在生产过程减少差异化产品，会将部分生产工作转移进仓库。通过延迟产品的差异化，上游经销商可以看清其产品(无差异化)的总需求。像笔记本电脑，工厂可以专注于无差异化的电脑本身，而不是关注许多个细分的市场，例如要为英语市场配最新版本MS Windows；而在德语市场，则是配Linux，等等。这样的无差异总需求将会更容易预测，因为它的方差更小(回想一下大数定律!)，这意味着只需不多的安全库存就能保证服务水平。
因为在商店进行差异处理化，成本又太高，所以放到仓库做比较合适了。因为在零售门店，土地和劳动力通常都比较昂贵，最好让那里的员工专注于与客户打交道。
