Getting Ready for the Holiday Rush Series – Automated Shipping

In our past few blogs we’ve discussed various processes crucial to ensuring your profitability this holiday season. As much as a strong inventory management process makes fulfilling orders a lot less complicated, there are other key processes that streamline order to fulfillment even further. Automated Shipping is an essential to guaranteeing that product reaches your customers in a timely and seamless manner.

Here is an example to better understand the importance of taking advantage of Automated Shipping:

It’s a few weeks before Christmas and one of your best customers emails you with a last minute order. On the back end of the shipping process, there are various processes that can easily be automated to make the order to fulfillment process during the holiday rush way more seamless. For example, since you already have a dynamic inventory management system, the setup of automatic labeling is extremely simple. Your system has the built-in knowledge to automatically create a label for whatever product the customer ordered, with all shipping information (name, address, shipping preferences, etc.) included on it. Since your system can automatically locate where the requested product is, the warehouse employees can easily allocate the label to the appropriate product and move it along for shipment.  At this point, the salesperson responsible for the order will get an email notification that the product has been shipped and your customer will also get an email notification confirming the same.

A few days pass and the inventory management system is set up to send out a shipping status notification.  At this point, the system pulls the customer’s information from the business partner listing. You now have the option of going into the system and checking the customer’s entire order history. In the system, it has the ability to alert the customer when the specific holiday order was shipped, over the course of how many days, and whether or not it was invoiced in different cycles. This provides the customer with more insight into where their order is and when it will be delivered. From here, the system will also provide the specific order information and find their tracking and shipping numbers, which in turn links back to UPS tracking (or whatever carrier they are using). The next step is for the system to go back to the sales order and send out a delivery tracking notice to the customer. The order delivery report will automatically get sent out with any contacts you have included to CC, as well as any faxing preferences, if required.  An order confirmation gets automatically created, which shows the customer the original order, when it was shipped, what the shipping number is, and what her tracking numbers are. This seamless process ensures the customer that the product they ordered for Christmas will be delivered on time.

As you can see, the ability to keep your customers in the loop throughout the shipping process, especially during holiday crunch time, is not only possible, but fairly simple as well. Contact Third Wave today to discuss your options for automatic shipping and easy follow up capabilities today!