Virtual Warehouse? It's already a reality!
Once upon a time, and perhaps still today, in small towns where everyone knew each other, a primordial form of virtual warehouse already existed. Each family had, so to speak, a certain quantity of food supplies in the pantry and if, in an emergency, two eggs or other oil were missing, they could count on the availability of some helpful neighbour. If every family in the town had conceived, absurdly, a common warehouse of supplies, based on the real needs of each one, in scheduled times and movements, they would have obtained an optimization of stocks, the availability of more space in each house and a consequent economic saving for the community.
Transporting this concept into the business world and into… the 2000s, where technological advances surprise us every day with the speed with which they move, we discover that the company Unitec has developed a technology that provides a truly own virtual warehouse for companies.
Things work more or less like this: we consider that various companies, even competitors, use the same items in their production chain or sell similar products, can use a common warehouse that is continuously monitored and replenished, with controlled stocks, paid invoices and that the company receives only one invoice per month for all this.
What can the savings be? No more reorders and oversized or undersized inventories, no more supply mix-ups, no more need for inventory control, invoices to pay and human resources distracted from the company's core business.
Even when purchasing supplies, the possibility of negotiating cumulative purchases would lead to significant savings.
If we want to make a hypothesis within three years from the adoption of the virtual platform, the warehouse would not entail additional costs and could constitute an asset for the sale of material supplied to other manufacturing companies part of the same platform that needed it. The adoption of the virtual warehouse therefore makes it possible to eliminate management overheads, to exploit negotiated and organizational synergies, to take advantage of greater price reductions in purchases, to guarantee better availability of supplies with relative raising of quality standards, and to reduce structural costs.
The 100% availability of a zero-cost warehouse is the dream of all companies.
