In business, as in life, sometimes it's far more beneficial (and less painful) to learn from the mistakes of others. A recent post from Evolving Excellence, a blog on enterprise leadership, points out a blunder many companies, especially larger ones, make in placing their distribution points in illogical locations for dumb reasons.
It isn't particularly sexy to breakdown, but as the post points out, there are many national-scale centers in some plain-old illogical spots -- just because there's this assumption the centers need to be near headquarters.
If the geometry and geography don't make sense, then any financial data saying it does is flat wrong (and it certainly wouldn't be the first time the accountants got it wrong).
So what should you do? Well, if you're at that benchmark in your company's development, think more about putting a distribution closer to where your customers are than where your company is located. Don't be like Skechers, who has trucks drive 2,000 miles east across the country from California just because the company thinks its distribution center needs to be near its HQ. You do want to make money, right?
Read the full post over at Evolving Excellence.
