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SouthworthProducts.com • salesinfo@SouthworthProducts.com
15-305 Pallet Invertor Ad-DCV.indd 1 9/11/15 11: 35 AM
www.dcvelocity.com OCTOBER 2015 DC VELOCITY 37
of Steiner and Heikell. Lambert said the
company and its customer base, whose
core is large retailers, have spent a lot of
time over the past 16 months preparing
for the changes. Through negotiations
with the carriers, Lambert said, Green
Mountain has helped shippers mitigate
a portion of the increases. “There has
been some impact, but it’s not as bad as
it could have been,” he said.
Lambert said the most revealing part
of the past year’s process was discovering that many shippers had no data-collection tools to capture dimensions or
to determine whether their package sizes
met the carriers’ revised criteria. Before
the changes, shippers were “not really
thinking about what they were giving”
the carriers, he said, adding that the new
regimen sparked a behavioral change on
the part of shippers.
Lambert said Green Mountain has
followed a three-step plan to deal with
the pricing changes: understanding their
impact, collaborating with carriers in
rate negotiations, and implementing
data-collection practices. The first two
steps have largely been completed; the
third is a work in progress that will take
some time, he added. All of this will
come as retailers move from having
two to four distribution centers for fulfillment, to managing hundreds if not
thousands of nontraditional locales like
retail stores that are now beginning to
serve as DCs.
ALTERNATIVE ACTIONS
FedEx and UPS originally made the
moves in an effort to better align package pricing with the amount of space the
parcels occupied on a truck. They also
believed that customers could gain by
streamlining their packaging to remove
unneeded “empty air” surrounding the
product. Spokeswomen for the carriers
said they’ve made a concerted effort
to work with customers to make their
packaging more efficient, in some cases
connecting shippers with packaging and
technology companies to help them
remove “filler” and shrink shipment
dimensions.
There are also alternatives. Shippers
can use regional parcel carriers and the
U.S. Postal Service (USPS), both
of which offer higher dim-weight
divisors and thresholds. They could
shift packages to services like FedEx
“SmartPost,” managed in conjunc-
tion with USPS and which does not
use dimensional pricing. Apparel
shippers in particular could migrate
to polybags for lighter, smaller ship-
ments. Martinez suggested that mer-
chants offer online shippers free
shipping only to retail stores rather
than to the consumer’s residence.
That way, multiple orders can be
consolidated into one commercial
shipment, he said.
