Satellite warehouse provider in Vietnam

17.05.2023

Global supply chain after facing many fluctuations from epidemic, geopolitics tensions, which has changed to adopt with the new situations. Many manufacturing businesses now spend more concern on diversifying their supply chains, notably warehousing and satellite warehouse services in Vietnam.

Satellite warehouse in Vietnam is in the booming stage to catch up with the uprising demand from businesses. Which logistics businesses can provide suitable satellite warehouse for your business in Vietnam? Let’s find out in this article.

What is satellite warehouse?

Satellite warehouse basically resembles with other warehouses in term of its main function is storing goods, but the differences of satellite warehouse from the others lies in 4 aspects: Location, density, goods circulation rate and operational procedures:

Location: Other warehouses often aim to be the main hub for import/export goods, for this reason their storage capacity must sufficient. On the contradictory, satellite warehouse requires capacity a lot smaller than other types (approximately around 300 – 500m2), and location is closer to customers, the goal for such requirements is better order fulfillment process.
Density: When a service chain become closer to customer, it must increase its coverage in the customer’s eye, for this reason, satellite warehouse needs to increase local coverage to maintain the stability of distribution process.
Goods circulation rate: Although the amount of goods distributed to satellite warehouse is limited, but circulation rate is only counted by hours. This is one the fastest goods circulation warehouses, others are: distribution center, order fulfillment warehouse, cross-dock warehouse,…
Operational procedures: This can be noted as the unique feature of satellite warehouse, the shelves in this warehouse do not require traditional layouts that have aisles in between. Instead, all the shelves are put beside each other, when extract pallets out, the workers in satellite warehouse must follow LIFO method and use push-back device to lift designed pallet out of the shelves. The reason why satellite warehouse choose this operational procedures is optimizing limited space in the facility by removing the aisles.

In the picture, we can see the push-back device in the middle of the sidebars, when the device receives the order, it will move to the exact location of the pallets by LIFO order.

*Note: Although satellite warehouse has different import/export method than other warehouses, it still connects to WMS (Warehouse Management System) and have the same attributes to track information about goods amongst warehouse system, only in the stocktaking period, workers need to sync the differences of LIFO and FIFO methods.

Which kinds of business suitable with satellite warehouse:

As we mentioned above, satellite warehouse with the characteristics of fast goods circulation rate, limited capacity and high density in localities. Businesses that are matched with such characteristics often have high rate localization, fast consuming goods and limited date expiry, including:

Retail businesses: including the ones that distribute to end user or intermediate agents such as supermarkets, convenience stores,…
Food manufacturing businesses
Pharmaceutical businesses
Others: Humanitarian aid organizations, businesses that requires to store goods when distributing to localities.

Satellite warehousing service provider in Vietnam

Currently, satellite warehouse is the new element in Vietnam market. Besides, the shifting trend of supply chains from enterprises have raised the waves of investment in logistics service chains that customized for specific businesses including satellite warehouses in Vietnam.

ALS has established logistics infrastructures in Vietnam’s “knots” of goods in order to stabilize business’s supply chain. Until now, ALS’s warehouse system covered up to 1 million m2 across Norther region of Vietnam, support various services alongside with business’s on-demand requirements. Types of warehouse that ALS provides to business include: