What's the difference between a cloud warehouse and a traditional warehouse?

Simply put, a cloud warehouse is an enterprise that provides warehousing and distribution services. Cloud warehouse is characterized by large fluctuation of single quantity, many kinds of goods, high timeliness of delivery and huge customer base.

What's the difference between a cloud warehouse and a traditional warehouse? There are mainly the following five points:

1, storage mode

In most cases, traditional warehousing is the same as warehousing area and picking distribution area, and it is essentially an operation mode determined by the warehousing mode of few varieties and large quantities. Most warehouses are flat warehouses and three-dimensional high shelves. Due to the characteristics of large quantities, the number of boxes or pieces in and out is the unit, and even the pallet is the auxiliary unit and carrier.

Cloud warehouse should deal with the characteristics of multi-variety and small batch. At the same time, under the premise of manual operation at present, special storage areas must be used to improve the storage utilization rate, so as to improve the picking efficiency.

2. Selection method

Traditional warehousing has a large batch, and many of them are directly transported by forklift. When evaluating the picking efficiency, boxes or pallets are also the main units. Because of the large number and few varieties, statistics can be repeated directly. E-commerce needs to win by scale, with many varieties, but few quantities, even single digits. Therefore, such fine operations are done with countless rough tools such as forklifts, and the common ones are car picking and turnover boxes.

3. Complexity of packaging

Traditional warehousing usually does not need secondary packaging after leaving the factory, so there is no obvious packaging line in traditional warehousing. Even if packaging is needed, it is strengthened for reinforcement or safety reasons.

In order to cope with the diversity of products and the different characteristics of customers' purchases, Yuncang makes a packaging scheme according to different commodity characteristics and under the constraints of cost and time to ensure the safety of goods in transit, which is incomparable to traditional warehousing.

4. Inventory method

The inventory of traditional warehousing is mostly carried out regularly, with few categories and large quantities, which can be repeated in batches.

This is not the case with Yuncang. In order to realize the integration of accounts and facts in the warehouse, there are a large number of warehousing and many categories every day. Under such conditions, in order to achieve the true accuracy of the data, it is necessary to carry out very flexible inventory work, and through the guidance and control of the system, constantly handle the differences, so that every change in quantity, state and position is synchronized with the real thing. By strictly controlling these tasks, we can make up for the shortage of static inventory.

5. Distribution mode

Traditional offline warehousing is mainly based on logistics distribution (LTL logistics and trunk logistics), supplemented by express delivery; Most of the cloud warehouses are based on express delivery (four links and one arrival), and a few large e-commerce platforms build their own logistics and distribution systems. For e-commerce, third-party warehousing can reduce the management cost and asset investment of its own operations and reduce the risks of its own operations, which is obviously more suitable than traditional offline warehousing.