Helping Companies Harness the E-Tailing Revolution

The e-tail revolution is in full swing and high-volume distributors simply don’t have the time to waste, the budget to spare, or the human resources to expend trying to figure out how to meet their customers’ ever-changing needs. To thrive, e-tailers need solutions that effectively automate the shipping process and allow them to focus on what they do best: delivering quality products to customers how and when they want them.

On track to hit $5 trillion in annual sales by 2021 the global e-commerce market rose by 20.7% in 2019 to a current $3.535 trillion, according to eMarketer. To help high-volume e-tailers get a sizable piece of this growing pie, Kelley’s 4SIGHT™ Connect - Dock solution provides access to real-time data and helps warehouse and DC operators gain full control over their entire dock operations.

In this Q&A, 4SIGHT Connect - Dock IoT Product Manager Daryl Day discusses the key challenges that high-volume e-tailers are dealing with at the dock and shows how tech-enabled dock dashboards can help these companies meet and exceed their customers’ demands in the competitive e-tailing environment.

Q: What challenges are high-volume e-tailers dealing with right now at the dock?

A: The pace of business has sped up considerably over the last couple of years. This rapid pace extends right out to the dock, where warehouse managers need complete visibility into equipment operations, including cycles, faults, and overrides that allow operators to intervene when needed. Using 4SIGHT Connect - Dock, these managers can get quick glimpses of their facilities, determine which docks are/aren’t available, easily route vehicles to empty docks, and/or schedule trucks to be picked up as soon as the dock restraint is released.

Q: How have e-tailers historically managed these processes?

A: In many cases, someone would either drive around on a golf cart to do dock checks or slog through the billing to see which docks were empty. Thanks to advancements in technology, they can now just look at a tablet screen and immediately know that X dock is open and send the truck there. This gives high-volume e-tailers a much more efficient and quicker way to move trucks around their facility than they ever had in the past.

Q: How does this technology provide new levels of visibility, oversight, and safety at the dock?

A: From our own experience using 4SIGHT Connect - Dock, we’ve found that it encourages employees to operate the dock exactly as they’ve been trained to do so. In other words, they operate the equipment exactly how you want them to operate it. This provides high levels of peace of mind for e-tailers, many of whom are running 50 to 100 different docks. Knowing what’s going on at all of those docks has traditionally been extremely difficult—you don’t always know when someone is not doing things the way you want them to. 4SIGHT Connect - Dock gives you an easy way to see if everyone is following the processes you put in place, and in some cases, determine if those processes actually need to be changed or updated.

Q: How does it improve the system override process?

A: At most facilities, putting a dock into override means going to find a supervisor or another person who knows the password, and who can administer the override. With 4SIGHT Connect - Dock, the system remotely alerts the supervisor, who can then automatically authorize the override. To put the system into override, the operator then simply has to tap a check box on his or her device. This eliminates a lot of time spent running back and forth, trying to find someone to authorize the override. 

Q: What are some of the other dock dashboard features that help dock employees work more efficiently?

A: Managers can use the platform to create custom “smart roles,” and to get alerts based on the different events that are happening within their operations. In an expansive environment where it’s always hard to find the right person to inform about a certain event, these smart roles can literally shave hours of time off an employee’s work day. If, for example, a dock supervisor wants to know that a restraint has been engaged at one of the dock doors, he or she can set up alerts for that and find out as soon as it happens. This feature alone can greatly improve operational efficiencies in and around the dock area.

Q: Do you have an example of this capability in action?

A: Sure. We recently installed 4SIGHT Connect - Dock at a facility where two docks were repeatedly going into restraint override. Wanting to get to the root of the problem, the warehouse manager worked with us to investigate the issue and learned that there was a problem with the restraint itself. Once the problem was fixed, the restraints began operating properly and almost never go into override. They’re operating as intended. In another instance, we remotely investigated the status of an alert, learned that it was a sensor, and sent a service tech onsite (equipped with the right replacement sensor) to fix it. That made for a much more efficient repair process.

Q: What are some of the undiscovered “wins” of using a dock dashboard?

A: Really just the fact that many operations have never had access to these insights. In fact, we’re pretty sure our own customers are using 4SIGHT Connect - Dock in ways that we didn’t even think of, based on what low levels of data and operational visibility they were dealing with previously. For example, the platform includes a basic set of reports that are available as CSV Excel files. That means users can access and manipulate the data in any number of ways that suits their operations, and then figure out new ways to leverage this information (i.e., for better decision-making).

Q: How do these features and benefits translate into a more efficient high-volume e-tail operation?

A: You can’t improve upon something until you actually measure it. Once you start measuring how long it takes to turn a truck around at the dock, for example, you can determine 1) why it takes that amount of time and 2) how you can start reducing those numbers. Having worked with numerous customer that have a digital display of time taken to load or unload a truck, we’ve seen them make significant improvements in the dock management process. In a business environment where time is literally money, even the smallest “wins” in this area can add up to substantial savings.