How to Improve Order Fulfillment and Shipping with Stock Management Software

Summary: There are multiple steps of order fulfillment and shipment like order processing and product shipment. Most businesses use stock management software to automate their order fulfillment procedure. But how does it help? Let’s find out!

The accurate and timely shipment of products is important to meet the customer’s demands and improve the business bottom line. Stock management software will not just help with optimizing stock levels but also in managing the entire order fulfillment process to improve the customer’s shopping experience.

From receiving the orders till the time, they are delivered to the customers, stock management software can help you manage every aspect of the order fulfillment procedure. Therefore, with this software, businesses can accelerate their order fulfillment and shipment procedure to stay competitive and enhance customer’s experience.

What is Stock Management Software?

Stock management software helps in managing the incoming and outgoing supplies of goods in the organization. With it, users can manage tasks related to ordering, organizing, tracking, or selling stock. Stock optimization software is an important tool for businesses looking to improve business efficiency, reducing inventory costs, improving revenue, and so on.

Furthermore, it also comes with functionalities like order processing, labels generating, drop shipping management, etc., to simplify order fulfillment and shipment procedure.

What Is Meant by Order Fulfillment?

Order fulfilment can be defined as the procedure of receiving, packing, and shipping the customers’ orders. The procedure starts when a customer places an order and ends when the customer receives it.

The main purpose of order fulfilment is to deliver the customer’s order as soon as possible and without any hassle. The complete procedure includes elements like product inventory management, supply chain management, quality assurance, order processing, and customer service.

Using a stock management system can help you in managing all aspects of order fulfillment along with its shipment.

How Does Order Fulfillment Procedure Work?

The procedure for order fulfilment does not occur at a single place, instead across multiple locations. Generally, it starts from the warehouse where the items are stocked and packed, then order is shipped to shipment locations for labeling.

Once done it is transferred to the delivery center and finally delivered to the customers. Here is an overview of the complete order fulfilment process.

• Receiving Inventory: Inventory items procured by your business should be properly counted and inspected to ensure you have received the right stock items. Once received, all the items can be stored or retrieved by labeling them with barcode scanning.
• Storing and Organizing Inventory: Once the stocks are received, all of them are stored and categorized such as product type, expiry date, most selling products, lowest selling products, etc.
• Order Receiving: When a customer places an order, the same is updated in the inventory management solution and order processing starts taking place.
• Order Processing: Order processing is one of the key components of the order fulfilment process that would help improve customer satisfaction. This procedure includes picking the product, transferring it to the packing team, conducting a damage inspection and selecting the packing materials.
• Packing Items: Once the packing material is selected, the packed item is then transferred to the shipment center for further procedures after generating labels.
• Generating Label: The label is generated that includes details like package weight, size, name, price, etc. Once labeled, it is transferred to the shipment center.
• Product Shipment: The product is transferred to shipment locations to be delivered to the customers. The shipment service would decide on the most optimal carrier method depending on the weight and dimensions of the shipment. Once the right method is decided, the shipment is delivered to the customer’s address within the stipulated time.
• Sending Tracking Data to Customers: Once the item is shipped, you can send tracking details like order ID and delivery agent information to your customers. This will make it easier for customers to track their shipment in real time.
• Order Delivery: When your customer receives the order, the same will be auto updated in the stock management software along with delivery details.
• Order Returns Processing: Returns processing begins when the customer returns the product for a specific reason and the organization conducts quality assurance and prepares for restocking it. However, if it is defective, then the item is discarded. If the item is restocked, it is transferred to the manufacturer for credit or refund or to a recycling facility.

How does Stock Management Software Help in Order Fulfillment and Shipment?

Interesting Quotes on Stock Management Software “Less emphasis on inventories, I think, may tend to dampen business cycles, because business cycles are typically in the grasp of inventory cycles and heavy industry cycles.”- Paul A. Volcker “Strapped by tight credit and plummeting sales, businesses have overhauled the way they manage supply chains, inventory, production practices and staffing.”-Janet Yellen

Stock management software can help a lot in enhancing the order fulfillment and shipment procedure including the ways like:

• Understand your order fulfillment cycle time
• Do inventory classification
• Keep enough inventory on hand
• Incorporate multi-location management
• Streamline inventory processes
• Improve transparency across multiple sales channels
• Providing options for viewing and updating order lists
• Increase picking accuracy
• Decide the best method to ship orders

• Understand Your Order Fulfillment Cycle Time

The order fulfillment cycle time starts when the order is placed and continues till the item is delivered to the customer. The less the cycle time the more satisfied your customer will be.

An effective inventory software lets you manage and schedule the workforce for handling the orders and keeping track of the inventory levels. This ensures that you have an ample supply of goods that can be quickly delivered on time to the customers and prevents delays in orders fulfillment.

Suggested Read: How Does Inventory Management Help with Stock Controls?

• Do Inventory Classification

Classifying all the inventory items by their group or category can help you sort the items and fulfill orders received for the most popular product category faster. With an inventory management system, you can categorize stock items to keep bestselling stock categories in the right quantities to fulfill orders quickly. Further, you can identify items that are bringing more revenue, expired and obsolete.

In addition to that, businesses can stock the most popular items in the nearby shipping center to reduce picking, packing, and delivery time and successful fulfillment of customers’ orders.

• Keep Enough Inventory on Hand

Stock outs might be a major reason for lost sales and unhappy customers. Therefore, keeping enough inventory on hand is an important step in boosting sales and improving customer experience. By keeping a close check on your inventory levels, you can ensure that you have ample stock to meet the customers’ demands.

Moreover, with inventory software, you can coordinate with the product suppliers to ensure you have enough stock to fulfill all the customer’s orders.

• Incorporate Multi-Location Management

Managing multiple warehouses through an inventory management system will provide you with complete visibility into your inventory. Thus, making it easier to track all the inventory levels in real time and ensure you have ample inventory items to fulfill customers’ orders. By using the inventory software, you can accurately track inventory in real time, enhance order fulfillment, and eliminate all the overstocking and understocking costs.

Company: MPL Sports is an athleisure, sporting equipment, and merchandise brand from Mobile Premier League (MPL). It is one of the most popular mobile e-sports platforms globally. Challenge: With distributed inventory across several warehouses, it became difficult for MPL to locate, track and pick the order. Thus, making order routing an obstacle for the brand. Solution: With Unicommerce warehouse management software, MPL was able to manage its stock in 7 warehouses and connecting them via various sales channels. Further, it helps them with order routing by letting them fetch various products from multiple warehouses for a single order. Impact: MPL achieved 90%+ fulfillment rates with the real-time order updates helping them to dispatch 15K+ orders/month.

• Streamline Inventory Processes

One of the most effective ways to improve order fulfillment is to streamline your inventory processes via inventory software. The inventory solution will automate inventory tracking, ordering the stock suppliers, and providing real time data to make better purchasing decisions.

Additionally, you can generate multiple inventory reports and gain insights into overall inventory. This would help in learning about the bottlenecks in the order fulfillment and shipment procedure and the necessary ways to remove them.

• Improve Transparency Across Multiple Sales Channels

It is important to create transparency within the organization, especially when you are running multiple sales channels. Therefore, it is important that every employee has information like stock levels, the customer’s order data, supplier’s details.

With stock management software, organization, suppliers, or shippers, can view all the order related data and communicate with each other in real time. This helps to keep all the people involved in the order fulfillment and shipment, thereby ensuring timely product delivery.

• Providing Options for Viewing and Updating Order Lists

With a stock management solution, you can provide options to your customers to update their order lists even after the check out. This enables customers to add more products to the same order that will be delivered together.

Further, it also allows the delivery agents to cross-check delivery items for better accuracy. Items ordered during the packing process can be shipped together with the existing products to cut down labor and shipment costs.

• Increase Picking Accuracy

Picking accuracy is important to ensure that the right item has been picked and delivered to the customers. To improve the item picking accuracy, you can use stock management software for ecommerce inventory control to accurately label products and ensure that all the correct items have been shipped and delivered to the customers.

Moreover, with barcode scanning, all the information related to the products like their stock level or expiry date will be auto filled in the system for the real-time stock updates.

• Decide the Best Method to Ship Orders

While dealing with order fulfillment and shipment procedure, your business might need to decide what is the best method to ship the order. One way to do so is to invest in stock management solutions to choose the right order shipment method.

The system will analyze data types like the shipment location, estimated delivery time, shipping charges, etc., to choose the most reliable shipment method that has the minimal cost and ensures timely delivery.

Moreover, with barcode scanning of products, businesses can track incoming inventory and get all the data auto-filled in the inventory management software for better stock management. This eliminates the need for manually maintaining inventory records and saving worker’s valuable time.

Suggested Read: Top 10 Free Inventory Management Software for Your Growing Business

Conclusion

Streamlining order fulfillment and shipment might seem tiresome at once, but using stock management software can help you a lot with it. From optimizing inventory for to timely deliver orders to manage the complete order fulfillment cycle, inventory software can help businesses to successfully fulfill and ship their customers’ orders timely.

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