What’s your most precious resource? If you’re like most of us, the answer is clear and resounding: TIME! And what’s one tool that’s been repeatedly shown to give back time? Automation. Setting something and knowing it will just get done allows you to focus on more result-producing efforts like talking to qualified leads, negotiating with prospects, or creating new products. And, smart fulfillment automation can help you put more cash toward your bottom line and save time to allow you to focus your efforts on growing your business.
Automated Order Fulfillment
With technical advances, automation has become ubiquitous: from email and text prompts to auto-replies, smart locks and automatic garage door openers, appointment scheduling, robotic forklifts, and more. Automation makes our lives easier by simplifying necessary but sometimes tedious or time-consuming tasks.
Order fulfillment automation uses barcodes, advanced technology, warehouse workflow, and more to streamline processes of picking, packing, and shipping the correct products to customers as quickly and accurately as possible. These processes improve efficiencies, which ultimately leads to more delighted customers.
Benefits of Improved Fulfillment Automation
Here are just some of the biggest benefits of using automation in your fulfillment process.
- Increased Speed—after they place their order, your customers want to receive it as quickly as possible. Fulfillment automation streamlines the complicated processes to get the orders out faster.
- Accuracy—one of the biggest challenges for businesses is order fulfillment. And when hundreds of orders are leaving your warehouse every day, it’s a challenge to manually keep track of all of the moving parts. Mistakes happen. By using advanced IT, you can prevent the pieces from falling through the cracks and better handle an influx of customer data and new orders.
- Service—more now than ever before, people rely on online shopping. There’s also a lot of competition in the space, so standing out for your exceptional service is one of the best ways to earn customer trust and repeat business.
Delayed orders, shipping or product errors, missed communications, and other customer service issues can quickly deteriorate vital aspects of customer relationships. Automation also makes it easier to scale up to continue meeting your customers’ demands as more orders come in.
How Fulfillment Automation Accelerates Growth
The more efficient you are, the more productive you are, allowing you to fulfill more orders faster. This is perhaps the biggest benefit of all when it comes to fulfillment automation.
Here are just a few of the ways automation helps:
- Decrease labor costs by limiting the need for human intervention in order verification, creating and printing shipping labels, notifying customers of shipments, and other important yet sometimes tedious tasks. The time saved allows your staff to focus on more critical and often more interesting duties that can only be performed by a skilled person.
- Promote shipping efficiencies, which, in turn, get your products into your customers’ hands sooner. Sorting and counting stock as well as packing and adhering labels can be done faster and easier by machines, allowing your team to move more orders in less time.
- Optimize the supply chain by consolidating data into one easy-to-understand dashboard, so you can better keep track of orders and inventory and forecast more accurately. For example, with barcode scanning, your inventory is also automatically updated, so you can see in real-time what products are selling or if your stocks are running low.
How to Automate Fulfillment
Your first thought with fulfillment automation might include futuristic robots picking and packing boxes. While there are advances in that direction, automating shipping processes more often comes down to the software that allows you to:
- Integrate e-commerce shopping cart (CRM) platforms with your fulfillment system with quick and simple setups.
- Access business intelligence from your web-based browser so you have a real-time view of orders, inventory, and everything else needed to manage your product fulfillment.
- Automatic notifications let you know when stocks hit key thresholds or sell-by dates to better balance your inventory to avoid over- or understocking products or allowing inventory to expire.
- Shipment tracking so you and your customers know when a product has left the warehouse, where it is on the journey, and when it hits the doorstep—with no need to enter data manually. This is a great way to prevent human error and ensure the product gets to the right place on time.
Whether you’re a direct-to-customer business or need omnichannel fulfillment, smart fulfillment automation can save you time, money, and frustration, so you can focus on growing your business and putting your time where it really matters.
Contact QuickBox today to find out how we can use automation to provide Fast, Friendly, and Accurate Fulfillment for your brand.
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