Shipping Station Best Practices
From NewHaven Software Wiki
Contents |
Overview
In 2014 a team of our finest went on the road to visit clients all over the country. One of the biggest things we learned is how much room there is for improved efficiency in the shipping department. The great news is that there are quick and easy solutions.
My Shipping Dept is Fine, Thank You
All of our clients have been shipping long enough to have reliable processes in place...but that doesn't mean they're efficient. Consider some of the benefits of enhancing those processes:
- fewer shipping errors
- reduced hours/employees needed to ship each day
- have scalability to ship higher volumes of packages with your existing staff
- offer your customers a later cut-off time for same day shipping
Any of that sound interesting? Read on!
Feeding the Warehouse
Are you still printing orders one at a time as they save? That may be OK if you're processing 20 orders a day but most of our clients are doing much more than that and would benefit from printing in batch. Using the Fulfillment>Batching option to either release a select number of orders to the warehouse (first in first out) or create invoice filters to prioritize your fulfillment in other ways like by shipping method, price category (retail vs wholesale), products on the order, or most any other criteria you can come up with. These options can both ensure your most important and time sensitive orders get handled first and you might gain efficiencies by having the warehouse picking certain types of orders at same time.
Shipping Best Practices
There are several things you can do to improve. Based on our decades of experience, here is a list of our recommended improvements and the order in which you might consider implementing them.
Good
- Shipping station in warehouse - First and foremost, you'll want at least one CMS workstation setup in your warehouse. If you're still printing shipping labels in the office and carrying them out to the warehouse, it's time to move that operation out to the warehouse.
- Use the Manifest screen in CMS to ship with both UPS and USPS. This screen provides you with an identical shipping process for both carriers including a single click to add packages to your shipment when more are needed than CMS projected. Just click the Label button and CMS will trigger the appropriate label to print from UPS Worldship or Endicia's Dazzle software (USPS.) In CMS 10.0 we've also added dimensions to the Manifest which will be required for more packages in 2015.
Better
- Scale - Connect an electronic scale to your shipping workstation so weights don't have to be typed in, avoiding errors and saving time.
- Bar codes - Add a package number bar code to your CMS invoice or pick ticket (e.g. InvoiceTemplate-MS-BC.rpt) to make adding a package to the Manifest a snap
With the scale and scanner in place, you can just place the package on the scale and scan the bar code to have the package added to the manifest and the weight automatically brought in from the scale. Easy, fast, and accurate! See our CMS System Requirements page for information on the scales and scanners CMS supports.
Best
Automated Label Printing - An option you can enable in CMS Setup is for automatic label printing on scan. This setting will use the weight from the scale (described above) or the CMS calculated weight if no scale is in place, to automatically print the appropriate shipping label as soon as the package bar code is scanned. Couldn't faster or easier. In cases where you know you'll want to make changes to the shipment such as adding packages or changing shipping methods, you can instead type the package number into the manifest and it will quickly bring up the package details without auto-printing the label.
