We've seen many organizations achieve inventory control and order fulfillment mastery, but a common factor always seems to be having a great plan.
Having an operational blueprint is essential to creating and running world-class fulfillment centers.
Create great system-driven processes to work with your inventory so your team is prepared to handle any inventory or order fulfillment situation.
For great inventory management to happen, the first step is to give your team an easy way to do data-entry, without actually doing data-entry.
By using a workflow driven system, data entry happens as team members work. This can greatly increases accuracy, and speeds up task completion.
This is not only the start of your inventory management journey, but this step is crucial to get right as having accurate inventory counts begins with this process.
Quicktip If you can get incoming shipment information like expected arrival dates or quantities of products in advance receiving will be much faster.
Knowing where products are and how much you actually have is an important part of daily inventory & order fulfillment operations.
Once your team has clarity when it comes to that, you can start really optimizing the process in terms of where to place products to speed up the rest of the processes in your fulfillment center.
Common efficiency gains can come from what level of racking you place certain products on, how far away from inbound & outbound stations, and so much more.
The process of relocating products from one bin or location to another seems simple, and it can be as long as your team is religious about logging movement within the facility.
The good news is that many inventory control systems like ours will track those movements as they are made through easy workflows in the mobile app or on the web application.
Order fulfillment would be very hard if someone doesn't know where something is because the data is not accurate or updated.
Counting inventory or recounting inventory is an important maintenance task that helps to ensure inventory is accurate.
Cycle counting or blind counting are common processes that can be used to keep everything up to date when done from time to time.
Quicktip The more your team utilizes the other workflows correctly, the less counting and recounting you will need to do.
This process is the backbone of your order fulfillment operations. If your team has utilized the other processes here well, this should be a highly efficient and error-free process.
Order fulfillment metrics to pay attention to would be picking accuracy, inventory accuracy, order cycle time, picks per hour, etc..
There are also many different picking styles and ways to organize them that can drive efficiency in your order fulfillment process.
Monitoring critical inventory management activities can be done quickly with a great KPI-driven dashboard.
31% of warehouses face workforce efficiency challenges
Cognitops
Organizing task importance by quickly filtering data allows you to keep your team focused on the most relevant tasks.
31% of warehouses face workforce efficiency challenges
Cognitops
Optimize the whole fulfillment center by addressing bottlenecks, streamlining inventory allocation, and fostering continuous improvement.
31% of warehouses face workforce efficiency challenges
Cognitops
Once your team has covered basic workflows, a great next step is to allow management to monitor, organize, and optimize inventory & order fulfillment operations for efficiency gains.
The key to turn managers into a strategic leadership layer for your inventory management operations is to make sure they have the data they need to make better decisions.
This could be done using dashboards, easily searchable data, reporting, and even with the help of AI.
Integrate all the places where customers want to buy from you. Give those channels a path to see your inventory availability, send your team orders for order fulfillment, and updates to serve your customers.
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Give your team access to fulfill orders from channels and channels access to your inventory data to know what they can sell to your customers.
Integrations are a great way to connect everything from inventory availability to order fulfillment directly into the channels that need this information.
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Put products into the hands of consumers quickly whether you choose to use shipping carriers, your own transportation options, or even leverage customer pickups as an option.
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The last step of the order fulfillment chain can be challenging and complex if not managed correctly, and even hurt your reputation with customers. A well planned shipping to delivery step helps win customer loyalty.
Typically a great starting point is to map customer expectations, like what shipping options they chose at checkout to what that means for your fulfillment team.
Leveraging software to translate this, and optimize processes for the last step of order fulfillment translate to happier customers, faster delivery times, and lower costs.
Step 1 - Map what comes from the channel at checkout to actual shipping methods and processes your team understands to bridge the gap.
Step 2 - At the time of order fulfillment, in your shipping process leverage rate-shopping and requirement rules to balance speed and cost to get products to consumers.
Step 3 - Check deliveries or set up automatic checks to make sure that orders have been delivered to or picked up by the customer.
Explore what the whole platform has to offer across our technology products and integrations with other great solutions offered by our trusted partners.
