For over five decades, the CMA Festival has been a cornerstone of Nashville's cultural landscape, celebrating the best of country music and drawing in fans from around the globe. This year’s headliners include the queen of country music herself – Dolly Parton, along with Thomas Rhett, Kelsea Ballerini, Luke Bryan, and many others. As the festival continues to evolve, Averitt's On Tour Logistics (OTL) service plays a vital role behind the scenes, ensuring that the festival's logistical needs are met with precision and expertise.

Identifying the most optimum distribution strategy is crucial for shippers to streamline the movement of goods and enhance supply chain efficiency. There are two primary types of distribution strategies that leverage warehouses to stage freight for distribution to final destinations: regional and centralized.

Over the past several years, two important challenges have developed for supply chains. First, the growth of online shopping has increased shipping volumes and demand for quick deliveries to consumers. Secondly, the driver shortage has strained freight capacity across multiple areas of the supply chain process.

Together, these challenges have forced shippers to rethink their warehousing and distribution services strategy. This is especially true for shippers that move mid to high volumes of freight across multiple markets.

To that point, look at Amazon's warehousing and distribution services model. Marketplace shippers (and increasingly Amazon's own line of products) sell to customers throughout North America and around the globe. To keep customer prices under control, Amazon understands the value in local and regional warehousing and distribution services.

With approximately 75 fulfillment centers and 25 sortation centers in the U.S. alone, the company's supply chain is structured to reduce final mile transit times and costs. This structure allows sellers to stage inventory across multiple key markets rather than having to ship individual orders hundreds or even thousands of miles.

Well, that warehousing and distribution services strategy is great for Amazon's sellers, but what about B2B and B2C shippers that sell and move products independently? It goes without saying that most businesses lack the capital to build a supply chain infrastructure on the scale of Amazon. Nonetheless, local and regional fulfillment solutions are increasingly becoming available to shippers to meet the growing demands of today's supply chain.