Bianca BarathEvery process needs a definite workflow. Many ecommerce entrepreneurs take order fulfilment lightly but that is detrimental to the business. Shipping workflow should be drawn prior to the first order placed in your site. Or, much earlier than that. There should be no room for error in the entire process. Shipping involves repetitive tasks like picking, packing, boxing, shipping.
And these tasks happen in a definite order every time there is a sale online. This tedious workflow should be designed as a well-organized system to prevent costly mistakes. Every step, from receiving the order to delivery, is important.
So, what are the advantages of having a shipping workflow for your online store?
Eases human training
When you have a very definite process in place, the person recruited to oversee the process needs to just follow the instructions. For every order, he goes from step 1 to step n and does not need to do much on his own. So, errors that arise from human intervention are reduced.
Smaller ecommerce ventures are often short on budget and there is not much budget to formally train warehouse employees. They cannot hire well trained folks. So, a lot of training happens on the job. So, when you have a well-drawn workflow, there is a plan for the employees to flow.
Saves a lot of time
Pick, pack, box, ship. Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat. When your sales is good, this is all your warehouse employees do. Unless there is a pre-planned workflow, things can get haphazard. The customer who ordered shoes might end up with a bag. Or, the customer who wanted the product overnight might get it 2 days later. So, with a workflow, you can maintain error free quality.
You needn’t train people individually. All you need to do is give the new employee, the workflow. Check out 5 Reasons to Fight Late Delivery
Errors are expensive and time consuming. With the workflow, errors are reduced and there is a lot of time saved with addressing errors, correcting them and setting things right.
Scope for improvement
When you want to look into your fulfilment process and address issues, say turnaround time or shipping accuracy, you can always start with the workflow. With the workflow, you can analyse time, quality and costs. And every change you make can be incorporated directly to the workflow. 3 best kept secrets to successful order fulfilment.
It also aids you in making accurate impact analyses because the step by step process will show you things that change with a tweak in a single step. Receipt of order, verification, inventory, quality control, packing, shipping, and shipment tracking for CSR… all these factors are built into the system.
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