EKN consumer analysts report that it costs retailers, on average, eighteen cents of every dollar an eCommerce order generates to fulfill the order from online purchase to customer doorstep.
With almost 20 percent of every sale going to pick, pack, sort, ship and fulfill inventory, the returns elsewhere must be visible. How can your order management system pick up this lost revenue and provide a positive operational ROI?
Automation
An efficient order fulfillment platform adapts to the specific warehouse set up of the business, and can easily adapt for growth and change in the future. Whether you have a small warehouse, a large warehouse, or several warehouses, finding an OMS with automated efficient pick, pack and ship functionality that integrates with major shipping providers is crucial. Features your warehouse should have:
- Shipping Integration that automatically chooses the lowest cost shipping method
- Intelligent automated decision making on warehouse routing
- Automatically generated pick-pack-pull lists that take into account the set-up of your warehouse
Fulfillment
Customers buy the way they want to, and will continue to look for innovative and convenient methods of getting what they need. Sitting on inventory is a revenue drain to your company, and modernizing fulfillment for the way today’s customers shop can help you sell more of this inventory before it goes to discount and closeout status. You can leverage your brick-and-mortar stores as a competitive differentiator in several ways such as:
- Buy anywhere, fulfill anywhere, return anywhere capabilities
- Leveraging in-store inventory to fulfill orders across channels
- Store pickup, ship from store, and ship to store
- Automate and execute subscription orders
- Drop-ship/Endless aisle
Batching and Picking
The manual time wasted for associates to find, pick and send off orders in the most efficient way possible is hard to quantify. Operational overhead is one of the biggest revenue drains in the warehouse, though much is necessary to run the business, there are spots for immediate improvements. Implementing rules-based order processing that accounts for the location of each item in the warehouse can help direct your picking-and-packing associates to the more direct, and efficient route possible. This not only saves time finding an order, it gets it out the door faster and ensures that SLAs are met for business orders, and customers get their order on time. Happy customers mean more repeat buying.
Want to know more about how your order and inventory management system can recoup operational costs and reduce overhead? Contact us today for a tailored demo of SkuNexus.
