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The hurricane season of 2017 has already taken a toll on lives, property and our economy. The unforeseen implications will not be fully realized for years to come. Many companies have realized just how inadequate their supply chains and redundancy plans really are. Many others are just now realizing that they do not want to be in that position should another natural disaster occur. Unfortunately, Hurricanes are not the only natural disaster that can paralyze your business and cause irreparable damage for decades to come. Look at the raging wild fires that continue to plague the west coast and look to Mexico for one of the strongest earthquakes seen in years.

The western hemisphere is not alone in life threatening weather conditions that affect our businesses. Heavy monsoons in India, Typhoons in Hong Kong and many more issues have affected our supply chain.

Look at Newell Brands who announced that Hurricane Harvey disrupted its manufacturing supply chain in Louisiana and Texas where it shut down two resin facilities driving up costs, tanking shares of stock and leading to thousands of people filing for unemployment benefits.

With disasters like these striking the US and our International Partners how do Global companies and supply chains plan for these inevitable disruptions and how can they mitigate the damage.

Catastrophic weather events, while not preventable they can be mitigated to lower the impact of such damage. Risk management is incredibly important and working with outsourcing supply chain companies is one such way to help mitigate your risk.

Case in point: Floor-Ready Services, which is an outsourcing partner, works with companies to develop a strategy to prevent cataclysmic supply chain disruptions. One such partner manufactures parts for appliances in China and prior to becoming a partner with Floor-Ready used to have to manage the supply to retailers at the factory. This burden made the company produce the products, package the products and ship the products in their final form to distribution centers in the US before going to Distribution Centers for Retailers and then on to the final destination, which is the individual Retail locations. This method is problematic if: Weather changes production, shipping affected by weather, retailer changes packaging, amount needed, etc. Floor-Ready mitigated their risks by: Partner shipped bulk products in containers direct to Floor-Ready. This allows them to buy larger quantities at lower cost. Floor-Ready received goods and fulfilled orders according to needs managing inventory levels based on min and max. Floor-Ready packages and kits items according to retailer and packaging needed. This allows partner to utilize same items for multiple vendors by changing packaging and kitting methods. Should retailer desire to change packaging, it can be accommodated more readily unlike if all products are in their packaging and on the water coming from China.

By becoming part of the global supply chain for our partners, Floor-Ready allows them to position themselves to be more resilient and target areas that mitigate risk and bolster profits.

Floor-Ready has allowed our partners to realize up to 50% savings in processing costs alone. Imagine having a partner that becomes your extension of your business allowing you to overcome supply chain hiccups and even disaster to your supply network.

Floor-Ready Services has been providing outsourcing labor services and key business elements to companies for over 20 years. We have been providing services to some of the top retailers and manufactures of the world and have been mitigating supply chain issues to our partners throughout that time.

Floor-Ready Services receives, picks, packs and ships millions of items annually from all over the globe. We process Apparel, Accessories, Hardgoods, Manage Returns, Provide Quality Grading of Goods, Assembly, Dis-Assembly, Kitting, Display Build Outs, Labeling, Tagging, Re-Ticketing, Hanging, Folding, Sewing, Pricing, Packaging and any other services our partners need to succeed getting their products to the market place on time, every time.

Check out Floor-Ready Services at: www.floorready.com or contact: Todd Sides

Email: tsides@floorready.com

Office: 828-651-8504

Mobile: 828-708-8102

 

Our thoughts and prayers go out to those suffering after Hurricanes and other natural disasters!

According to Michael Zimmerman with Smart CEO, “Sooner or later, every business owner must ask the question: “Do I really want to outsource this process, or can I find a way to keep costs in house?” To some, it’s a matter of job preservation. To others, strictly profit. But whatever the litmus, the decision will have serious consequences- for owners, for employees, and for customers.” But, “outsourcing” doesn’t always mean “off-shoring” and “on-shore” doesn’t always mean “U.S.”

Outsourcing includes all the functions an organization could have chosen to scale up to do internally, but chose to buy from other providers instead. Many marketing services, for example, are routinely purchased from freelance writers and designers, advertising agencies, BPO providers, and strategic consultants. These services are outsourced for many reasons, including insufficient volume of steady work to keep full-time staff productive year-round, inability to attract the highest caliber of employees to job functions that may be peripheral to the organization’s core discipline, and a desire to avoid distraction from the core competencies that define an organization’s competitive distinction.

And the U.S. is not the only country outsourcing — in fact, we’re not even the biggest player. Globally, the outsourcing market amounted to $104.6 billion in 2014, with Europe, the Middle East and Africa leading the charge, followed by the Americas and Asia.3 To help put that number in perspective, $104 billion would be enough to build New York’s One World Trade Center, twenty-seven times. Some estimates, including one by market information provider IBISWorld, put the global number even higher, at $136 billion, funding over 900,000 jobs at 162,000 businesses. It is projected that outsourcing will be well over $200 billion by 2022 just for the US and over a $ Trillion dollars globally.

On the positive side of the equation, outsourced suppliers are often more flexible with their availability, offering services around the clock and even on weekends and holidays, often at “normal” price levels. The level of available talent increases, too, as geography expands, simply because the pool from which talent can be sourced expands from “commutable” to global. And because many outsourced services can be virtualized, they may be accessible from any internet-connected device, even while mobile.

Cost containment is a major driver in most outsourcing decisions, but many other benefits exist as well, including improved efficiencies, greater sense of business continuity, mitigating risk by leveraging specialists, and freeing staff to focus on core services and strategy.

Floor-Ready Services is your trusted Outsourcing Partner. Floor-Ready Services has been supplying outsource services for over 20 years. As an Outsourcing Partner, Floor-Ready Services improves our partner’s profits and quality the marketplace. We allow you to focus on your Core Competency, which is selling more products, while we focus on ours, which is getting your products to market quicker and more economically.
Floor-Ready Services receives, processes, picks, packs and ships millions of items annually for some of the top manufacturers, retailers and organizations in the world. Floor-Ready processes: Apparel, Accessories, Hardgoods, Manages Returns for clients, Provides Quality Grading, Assembly of Goods, Dis-Assembly of Goods, Kitting, Display Build-Outs, Labeling, Re-Ticketing, Hanging, Folding, Pricing, Packaging and any other services to give our partners speed to market, flexibility and cost reduction. In many cases our services can cut your processing costs by up to 50%. We specialize in these processes and only use experienced, well trained full time labor allowing us to eliminate valuable time to get your products to market.

www.floorready.com

Todd Sides-VP Sales & Marketing
tsides@floorready.com Mobile Number: 828-708-8102

I was in a meeting with a large worldwide manufacturer and uncovered that they budget $4 million a year for “charge backs”.  I was floored. That’s a great deal of revenue gone for knowing they were not going to meet their customers’ “Vendor Compliance Guideline/Routing Guides”.   They are a large company so I guess they think they can afford the errors.  I asked a few more questions to see, if they knew they had a $4 million dollar problem,  why not let Floor-Ready fix the vendor compliance problems?  We’ve learned with experience that some retail chains thrive on making their vendors pay for non-compliance.  This means the retail chain is getting the product basically for free due to the cost of each charge back or even worse, making money off their vendors’ errors.   They send their buyers to school to learn how to make their suppliers jump through hoops,  hoping they make a mistake to their benefit.

Vendor Compliance Guidelines/Routing Guides have various requirements for receiving their product shipments from suppliers such as:

The size of the box required to be used

How the boxed is taped – some require specific types of tape

How many boxes on a pallet, including how the boxes are actually arranged on the pallet

Specific case pack assortments based on individual store level needs (A,B,C,D store assortments)

Specific labeling requirements by individual item

Specific labeling requirements by case pack, by store, by pallet (where it needs to be placed exactly on the box and what specific information is required per box

And now a lot of retailers are requesting “green” packaging, meaning using recycled boxes, using less fillers

Those are just the tip of the iceberg of vendor compliance, and each retail chain has different and specific requirements based on their individual store needs.   What would it do for your bottom line if you were paying $15 per box-label you got wrong?  What would it mean if you actually lost the opportunity to do business with that chain because you just can’t get it right?

You won’t have to worry about these issues by utilizing Floor-Ready Services, Asheville NC.  We have 13 years of experience in providing our clients exactly what their Vendor Compliance Guidelines/Routing Guides state, what they want, how they want it, and when it needs to be there.   We currently ship to over 70 major nationwide retail chains. Give Floor-Ready Services, Asheville a call 828-651-8504. We will get your product in stores right the first time, giving you PEACE OF MIND.

www.floorready.com

 

Linsey M. Beuchot

VP – Customer Service

Floor-Ready Services, Inc.

Contract packaging services provide a quick and effective means to offload overhead and expenditures, allowing you to quickly realize a return on your investment.  Slim down a bloated supply chain by letting us process your materials, and get your products to the store Floor-Ready.

We are hearing “I make a pretty good profit here, but this “OVERHEAD” is starting to take out a pretty big bite.”  Increasing ACA taxes and regulations, increased utilities cost, increased labor cost with less production hours and so on.  Floor-Ready Services, Inc. can increase your bottom line by directly lowering your overhead with our Contract Packaging Services.  We can scale with any packaging project need.   Employing full-time, dedicated staff — we have you covered with our experienced Contract Packaging Team.  Eliminate the costs associated with packaging your product, let us show you how our years of experience in packaging and retail vendor compliance can save your business when every penny counts.  

Floor-Ready Services, Inc. will fully manage your Contract Packaging project from receipt of raw goods to fully prepared end-user “floor-ready” products down to store level.  You no longer need to pay those increasing packaging costs that everybody is passing on to you to pay for their own increases.   Floor-Ready Services, Inc. located in Asheville NC 28704 is a 137,000 sq. ft. facility fully staffed with full-time employees eager to process your Contract Packaging projects.   Give us a call and let us do your 1^st pallet free to PROVE we CAN INCREASE YOUR BOTTOM LINE!   828-651-850P

www.floorready.com

94 Glenn Bridge Road

Asheville, NC 28704

Find us on Twitter:  @FloorReady

One of the services we pride ourselves in offering at Floor-Ready is Product Rework, especially Apparel Rework.  Is the product that you have manufactured, and are about to offer to your customer, somehow “just not right”?  Be it a quality control issue from your manufacturer, or a mishap in your processing center, it needs to be reworked immediately or you lose revenue.  Doing this In-House would normally cause a waste of resources in your organization, costing man-hours, causing floor space conflicts, and manufacturing delays for reworking old product that should have been Floor-Ready.  Our partners tell us they used to spend countless hours and resources tediously doing rework on flawed manufacturing.  Then they found Floor-Ready’s rework services, and said goodbye to the hassles!

Floor-Ready Services, located in Asheville, North Carolina, is here to handle the rework project for you.  Floor-Ready Services provides a reworking facility with 137,000 sq ft of space for any project in convenient Asheville, NC with access to multiple shipping routes.  With capacity for the largest rework projects, the right equipment for the job, plus a full-time trained staff, and dedicated management team, Floor-Ready services provides the best rework service for the fastest return on investment.  Floor-Ready Services manages the logistics of all rework issues end-to-end from receiving bad product, evaluation, corrections, and reporting right through to shipping out corrected reworked product to the distribution center or even store locations.  Our rework produces Floor-Ready products.

Rework examples:

• Incorrect labeling on apparel or hardline goods
• Garment care, size, sku, and price reworking and relabeling
• Missing or defective parts replacement
• Incorrect assembly
• Incorrect kitting
• Removal of expired product within a kit
• Electronics internals ie. The cat says “woof” and the dog says “meow” voice box switch

 

As a Bonus: Floor-Ready Services pricing provides a per-unit fixed cost.  Additionally, our workforce is flexible. Should you need immediate attention on a rework project, we have the ability to move staff on-demand, giving you a quick turnaround.   We provide the fastest rework services available at a fixed cost.  Whether it’s a one-time urgent need or a perpetual rework project, let Floor-Ready Services be your partner in reaching your quality commitments to your end users.  Give Floor-Ready Services a try, we will do your 1^st pallet for free just so we can show you Floor-Ready Services can do it faster and for less, without having to go through all the headaches!

 

Floor-Ready Services, Inc.

94 Glenn Bridge Road

Arden, North Carolina 28704

828-651-8504

www.floorready.com

Does this old adage still hold true when it comes to your employees?

I recently read an article in which it said;  Survey: 63% of Workers Not Engaged, Struggling to Cope With Work

“When workers are not fully engaged, it leads to greater performance risk for employers. It makes companies more vulnerable to lower productivity, higher inefficiency, weaker customer service, and greater rates of absenteeism and turnover,” said Julie Gebauer, managing director, Talent and Rewards, at Towers Watson, in a press release about the survey.

In most corporate structures that do “production/processing” work on average they get 85% production out of an employee over an 8 hour day.  That means each production employee only “works” 6.8 hour out of an 8 hour day.   That equates to a loss of 1.2 hours a day, 6 hours a week, 24 hours per month, and 312 hours annually of “LOST PRODUCTION”.

Now top that off with 63% of those employees are NOT engaged in what they are doing, what does that really mean to your bottom line? What does that mean for the quality of work going out the door? What does that mean for the need of “rework” associated with poor quality?  What does that mean for “turn-over” and retraining?

At Floor-Ready Services our employees are 100% full time employees.  The majority of our staff has been with Floor-Ready Services for over 7 years.   This is not a “job” for our employees it is their “career”.     So why worry if your staff is engaged and producing at 100% all the time when Floor-Ready Services has a fully engaged staff that can guarantee you the “BIGGEST BANG FOR YOUR BUCK”.    

At Floor-Ready Services you do “Get What You Pay For”!  We guarantee it!

Read more: http://www.tlnt.com/2012/07/12/survey-63-of-workers-not-engaged-struggling-to-cope-with-work/

 

Linsey M. Beuchot

Director of Sales & Marketing

In a paper prepared by Booz/Allen/Hamilton (Profits or Perils? The Bottom Line on Outsourcing) they speak of possible flaws in not achieving a perfect “outsourcing solutions”.  Here are a few they discussed;

Flaw 1:  If an organization never moves beyond the “simple stuff” such as payroll and catering, there will never be a significant impact on the bottom line.

FRS’s BPO solutions will give you that impact that can make the difference to your bottom line.  When FRS takes on a project we take full ownership and accountability of the process beginning to end.  No more holding the hand of your “in-source” (in house processing) provider.  What will you do with all that extra time, huh the job you were hired to do perhaps?

Flaw 2:    Inappropriate amount of attention paid in supplier selection.  Evaluating a potential supplier, a thorough review & analysis of their track record, qualifications and cost structure need to be considered.

FRS’s BPO solutions have a 13 year track record of providing the right solution for the task at hand.  Our customer testimonials over the years show our in depth qualifications to handle any job in the way our customers expect 100% quality all the time.  There may be times we are not the cheapest but as the saying goes “you get what you pay for”.  Nothing leaves our docks without being 100% to customer’s specification.    We take full responsibility and have full accountability with a 100% guarantee your product arrives just the way you imagined.  Giving you “Peace of Mind” it was done right the first time.  What is “Peace of Mind” worth to you and your organization?

Flaw 3: An organizations inability to change the way they manage the new relationship and processes put in place.  This gives an organization the sense of “losing control”.

At FRS the customer is always in full control of the process, without having to be on hand for direct supervision and hand holding.  Our doors are always open for our clients to just walk in and see how their process is going.  FRS works closely with all our clients to establish the expected goals and objectives of our clients.  Once the proper processes and procedures are established you can walk away knowing we fully understand your goals and promise to exceed your expectations.  We do not succeed unless YOU SUCCEED.

Read the full paper here: http://www.boozallen.com/media/file/FINAL_Outsourcing_Broch.pdf

Linsey M. Beuchot

Director of Sales & Marketing

As you grow your business, you take on new challenges and clients. You’re always looking to expand your level of production. And as you grow, you’re going to need more employees. Sounds simple, right? But expanding your business doesn’t always mean that you need to hire new employees. In fact, if you look closely at the financial considerations of making a new hire (or hires), you’ll start to see that hiring new employees might actually keep your business from growing.

For example, wages are the first thing that comes to mind when you calculate the cost of a new employee. But what about health insurance? Paid vacations? Payroll tax? Worker’s compensation? When you balance the total associated costs against the potential benefit a new employee will bring to your company, it quickly becomes apparent that it’s not as cut and dry as it appears.

On the one hand, an additional employee should allow you to increase your overall production. On the other hand, you are also adding to your ongoing fixed costs and increasing your overall budget, even in seemingly unrelated departments (such as additional hours for HR staff to process paperwork). Even hiring someone for what appears to be a part-time position may be more costly than anticipated. Many states consider someone who works 30 hours a week to be full-time, which increases your exposure to the benefits an employee is entitled to, including unemployment compensation and insurance coverage under Obamacare.

With all of this in mind, you may begin to feel like it makes sense to turn down potential jobs or clients simply to avoid the headache of adding employees. And that’s where FRS comes in. Our dedicated team functions as your on-demand labor force without ever adding to your fixed costs or long-term overhead. We give you the confidence to grow and expand your business, to take on new projects and to always be looking for new opportunities, knowing that FRS can handle the labor logistics in a timely, professional and, most importantly, cost-effective manner. Get in touch with us today and let’s get started building a dynamic and productive partnership!

Read more: COST-PER-HIRE American National Standard

COST OF LABOR ON THE RISE, ARE YOU PREPARED?

FLOOR READY SERVICES IS PREPARED AND WE ARE HERE TO HELP YOU MAINTAIN YOUR MARGINS IF NOT INCREASE THEM

With the closely approaching implementation of the Affordable Health Care Act staffing agencies may be passing on the cost to you, by increasing their hourly rates to cover the cost impact to their bottom line. We here at Floor Ready Services are fully ready for the new changes taking place. We only employ a full-time labor force, our overhead is low and our costs are lower than what you might already be paying for labor. Once Floor Ready Services quotes a price, we never increase it no matter what’s happening in the economy.

Now, staffing agencies will first need to decide if they will only offer part time employment of under 30 hours per week or even offer medical benefits to their employees at all. Or opt out and pay the penalty of $2000, per employee over 50 minus the first 30 employees. This will require their employees to enter into the state exchanges or pay the personal penalty of $95 the first year, which will increase yearly. Reports have stated if the exchange pricing is greater than $25.00 a week these type off workers will not purchase this option because they are living pay check to pay check already.

Insurance underwriters will find it difficult to provide corporate policies at an affordable rate due to the nature of “short term” employment assignments. With the elimination for pre-existing conditions, temporary staffing agencies could be hit with hiring an individual with a “pre-existing” condition they were unaware of. Then shortly after starting work, they require a major medical procedure or are diagnosed with cancer, the agency will then need to foot the bill. Some insurance groups are falsely leading these types of companies to “self-insured” policy providers. This will mean the insurance company will process the paperwork but the agency will be fully responsible for the financial risk of each employees health.

No matter what route they take their cost of doing business has greatly increased without even considering the cost of adding additional personnel to handle the administrative tracking and reporting to meet Federal requirements. So, if you are currently utilizing in-house temps or outsourcing to a company that uses temporary employees be prepared to see your hourly rates increase. Thereby increasing your cost of goods sold. Will you then pass that increase along to your customers? Will you or your customers be able to take this hit to the already tightening revenue stream?

Let Floor Ready Services handle your processing labor needs for you. There will be no more wondering what the ultimate cost will be to your bottom line. Let us fix those costs for you TODAY!