If your company thrives on customers making orders and then you supplying them with what they need, there are a lot of moving parts you need to keep your eye on. In the end, however, it all comes down to order fulfillment. The faster you can handle this process, the happier your customers will be. However, the faster you handle order fulfillment, the more customers you can have as well, meaning much greater profits over time. So consider the following ways your company could begin fulfilling more orders in the near future.
Get Rid of Paperwork
Even though we’re well into the digital age, many companies—even those that exist solely online—still rely on a lot of paperwork for their regular operations. This means that an order won’t go through until some kind of physical form is manually filled out.
Aside from representing unnecessary overhead, this type of reliance on paperwork also means all kind of precious time is wasted. Some companies may be employing staff simply because they need individuals to handle sorting for them. This also means they’re opening themselves up to all kinds of human error.
Considering all the software out there for businesses to choose from, paperwork can easily fall by the wayside. Just about every company will see greater efficiency and fewer orders from kicking paperwork to the curb.
Consider Facility Workload
Another way companies get stuck handling things the way it’s always been done has to do with which facilities handle what workloads. Whether we’re talking about warehouses or smaller facilities, the point is that there is some component responsible for sending out orders. Often, facility A handles one type of product and facility B handles another.
If you’re not assessing this situation regularly, though, you may be missing out on an opportunity to optimize this approach. Facility A may still be ideal up to a point, at which time it would make sense for facility B to start pulling some of the weight. You may find that, for whatever reason, facility B is just superior at sourcing certain orders. Whatever the case, it’s worth analyzing the matter.
Better Streamline Sales and Offers
One of the ways a lot of companies market themselves is by offering better deals than the competition—even if only for the short term. Often this means lowering the price for customers who order product in bulk.
This is a fine approach assuming you have your fulfillment component in place to handle the extra demand. Otherwise, unnecessary mistakes can happen that end up costing money. Of course, it also mean simply missing shipping deadlines and ensuring customers won’t be back for return business.
You can increase the efficiency of your fulfillment process if you plan it into these kinds of offers. So, while part of the math involved in these deals is working out how much a product can be sold at to still bring in a profit, it’s just as important to factor in what kind of assets will need to be put toward supporting this campaign.
Integration
Like many companies, yours may rely on a number of systems for fulfillment. Unfortunately, these assets can become impediments when they’re not working in unison. That’s where a high-end multichannel retailer software program can come in handy. It works to keep all systems on the same page and working in unison toward the desired goal. So you never have to worry that you’re losing efficiency because of something that should be increasing it considerably.
The end takeaway from these suggestions is really utilizing a multichannel retailer software. This will handle all of the above concerns or make it easier to approach the issue.
Source:
https://www.vitechgroup.com/web/pdf/increase_speed.pdf
