How Small Businesses Can Combat High Gas Prices

While small businesses can't control gas prices, they can become more fuel conscious and efficient. This GardenCenter article details 8 ways to get started. If gas prices are impacting your business, read these tips and see how you can do the little things to reduce gas expenses.

David Wilson, Flickr.com

If you're an independent garden center owner who has a landscape division, operates a delivery service or uses trucks, golf carts and other vehicles, you've likely noticed that gas prices have increased during the past few months. This past week alone, the average cost of a gallon of gas increased by 7 cents, according to Sage North America. To combat the steep prices, they've provided suggestions to improve fuel efficiency and save money.

With the high prices of gas weighing heavily on small businesses these days, Connie Certusi, executive vice president and general manager of Sage North America’s Small Business Accounting, offers the following gas tips for small businesses:

1. Plan, plan, plan - With the help of websites such as Google Maps, plan out your deliveries and group them by area, date and time, when possible. Additionally, change your hours of delivery so that you aren’t sitting in rush-hour traffic, which wastes both time and gas. Using GPS can also help you avoid getting lost and wasting gas by circling the block. Lastly, consider asking customers who live nearby to pick up their orders rather than shipping it to them.

To continue reading about the top 8 tips, click here.

Is the Term "Accident" Still Acceptable?

The following is an excerpt from EHS Today.

Safety, like all other fields of endeavor, has its own terminology. In science, terminology is critical to ensure that everyone is talking about precisely the same thing. Shared terminology can align thinking and foster common understanding. When trying to solve problems or expand knowledge, defined terminology can provide the same starting place from which progress is made. In short, terminology can get everyone on the same page.

One of the most common terms in safety has been under attack for the past two decades. This is the term "accident." The attackers have suggested that the term implies that the event was inevitable and unstoppable; that accidents are events over which humans have no control. Some also have implied that a true accident is an "act of God" and therefore it is useless to try to place blame or determine causation. Why attempt to control something that is uncontrollable and beyond human manipulation?

To read the full article, visit EHSToday.com.

Your execs should know: Safety isn’t a commodity anymore

The following is an excerpt from ISHN.com.

The safety job has matured, and will continue to do so – that was one of the takeaways from last week’s National Safety Congress & Expo, sponsored by the National Safety Council.
You can measure safety’s maturity a number of ways. What your execs should understand, if they don’t already, is the days of “a glove is a glove,” “glasses are glasses,” training videos come “canned” from off the shelf, and safety programs… well, if you seen one you’ve seen them all – those days are gone.

Advances in the materials used in just about every type of PPE require a more educated buyer when it comes to making selections. More and more training is not “canned” but customized to specific sites. Leading and lagging safety performance indicators are also customized to be site-specific. Wireless gas detector networks generate volumes of data to be analyzed. Safety apps are raining down on safety departments with absolutely no end in sight.

When you purchase a safety product now, check out the services that are offered with it. PPE vendors are big on education and consultative selling, knowing how overworked many safety managers are today. Some are creating portals where, for a subscription fee or some other form of pricing, you can download training materials, safety meeting materials, checklist, tip sheets, and more. Yes, all this “value added” from PPE makers.

To read the full article, visit ISHN.com.

Back to Basics: Inventory Handling and Tracking Technologies

This article was originally posted in Material Handling & Logistics.

Inefficient or poorly-managed logistics operations increase overhead and reduce customer satisfaction, posing a significant threat to a manufacturer's profitability. Technologies can lend an almost scientific approach to logistics operations planning. With that in mind, let's look at just one area in which technology is making an impact—inventory tracking and handling.

The Fully Automated Warehouse

Full warehouse automation is the most comprehensive example of technology use in retail warehouses. The biggest manufacturers can find that success creates its own particular challenge when it comes to order fulfilment—a gigantic customer base, demanding swift delivery of a huge range of products, to innumerable locations ranging from retail stores to the very homes of the consumers themselves.

To create the operational fluidity necessary to satisfy their millions of customers, leading companies will often invest heavily in completely automating their warehouse facilities. Such facilities tend to have a completely integrated system where specialized warehouse management software interacts with specially designed automated racks, cranes, and stackers to ensure that inbound items are loaded, and outbound items located, retrieved and passed along a network of conveyor belts to the appropriate loading bay—with high accuracy rates.

IKEA, Walmart and Zappos are just some of the retail giants that currently employ these advanced systems as an integral part of their low cost/large scale operations.

Read the full article here to learn more about inventory handling and tracking.