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When seeing the entire logistics process for the first time, it will easily seem too complicated. Products are transferred, documents are updated, objects are moved, deadlines come and go and choices must be made. At the same time, you have so many activities, and it’s difficult to understand them all at once. But in order to fully understand how things are done, you shouldn’t try to see it as a whole. Rather, you should take a more incremental view and focus on one small action at a time.
Another method that can help you understand the logistics process is to see each step of the process as one part that is linked to the next step. If we go back to the picking example we’ve mentioned, we could think: after picking there is packing. What is important for this second step, picking to happen and for it to go smoothly? What must be the condition of the products? How do the numbers and the labels look like? We could continue in the same vein and see how each step connects to the other and, at the same time, we can understand that a single mistake in one step can be crucial for the success of the later ones. It’s true that in a logistics process, small mistakes are magnified and can make or break the entire thing.
There is another frequent mistake that people make and that is trying to understand a process simply by seeing it described and never by trying to reconstruct it yourself. It’s easy to read a story and to understand what it’s trying to say, but this is not necessarily the best way to really understand how things work. What you can do instead is rephrase the process in your own words and try to see if you’re missing some of the steps. For example, if you were to write a description of the picking process, you should see if all the actions are there in the correct order. And in order to fully understand the logistics process, it is not enough just to understand the movement of products or documents.
A way to practice the process is to choose a single small process in the logistics chain and try to simplify it. For instance, you can try to reduce the flow of processes to just two or three actions for picking (in the warehouse) and see if you can still understand how each of them is performed. Then, try to see what will happen if one of them is disrupted (e.g., if a product that is supposed to be received was not labeled correctly) and try to see what is the best solution for the disruption and how you can still follow the correct sequence. The idea behind this process is that the more you can learn to understand how one action is connected to the other, the more you can understand how disruptions or changes to the system can affect the entire logistics flow. This is a useful skill in this industry and it can help you better understand how logistics works and what are the best ways to improve it.
And yet, if something in the process feels too complicated, it could be because the process has not been sufficiently reduced. For example, if instead of just the picking process, you tried to analyze the picking operation as it is, it would be too complicated and would have too much detail. But if you try to understand a single action within this picking (for instance, the action of looking for the products in a storage), then you would see all the actions that happen during this search, what are the actions that trigger it, the actions that end it, etc. You can understand what goes wrong during this process and how to fix it. Another good idea is to use reflection to see which aspects of the process are confusing to you and why. Once you have seen these, you can understand what aspects of the process need more study. For example, after every session of understanding one aspect of the process, you could make some notes about where you had some trouble or what you didn’t fully understand and this could help you know what to do next.
And finally, you will notice that as time goes by, some aspects of the logistics process start to make sense to you. The individual actions will start to merge with each other and will make a pattern that can be applied to a different activity. For instance, a similar structure can be applied to the process of receiving, storing and dispatching of the products. Even if the details are different, they all require the same sequence, accuracy and attention. The idea behind this is to help you to recognize the commonalities between the different logistics activities. The result will be that instead of seeing the logistics process as something that is too complicated, you will see it as something that can be broken down into smaller parts, each one that you can understand on its own.