This term is commonly used in the e-commerce industry, since the need to pick small lots of products for customer orders has increased in recent years.
However, the each supply chain represents a challenge for manufacturers to go direct to consumers. Manufacturers’ warehouses are usually set up to deal with large orders being shipped to stores rather than individual items being shipped to a consumer. Warehouses and fulfillment centers were not designed to ship an “each” via FedEx or UPS direct to a consumer. Another challenge is that inventory systems were not designed with SKUs for “eaches”.
Micro-fulfillment centers are better equipped to ship items directly to consumers because they are smaller, located closer to consumers, and often use automated and robotic systems to help transform the efficiency of their fulfillment process.
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