Creating Priority Standards in Enterprise Shipping
Posted by Rachel Rodenborg on Wed, Sep 07, 2011 @ 01:45 PM
Does your enterprise shipping staff have a clear understanding of which order should be shipped first each day? Or are they blindly filling orders as they come down the line without consideration as to which customer is receiving the order?
In a perfect world, orders are filled on a “first come, first served” basis. In business, that’s not always the case—and with good reason.
Let’s say you are sporting goods distributor and a major discount retailer orders 50,000 footballs from you every month for the next year. Do you fill that order first each month? Or do you fill the smaller mom-and-pop store orders for 50 balls at a time and hope you have enough balls to fill the big order at the end? What if all the orders are filled except two and you only have enough product to ship one order complete, does your shipping personnel know which order takes precedence?
Given the scenario above, chances are good that you would fill the order from the major retailer first and then move on to the mom-and-pop stores. When it comes down to two orders and only enough product to fill one of them—there’s a pecking order. Someone is going to be backordered and it’s not always determined by the date the order was submitted.
It’s hard to swallow for some folks, but in business and real life, things are rarely “fair.”
There’s a priority standard or a ranking system in place to determine which orders get filled first. The trick lies in making sure that your shipping personnel know how to prioritize shipments or your system does if for you.
The ideal situation is to have a shipping platform in place that considers your shipping priority schedule and sequences a day’s orders in a way that follows those rules AUTOMATICALLY. That way, your shipping staff just fills the orders as they come down the line and doesn’t think twice about it. No questions of who gets product and who doesn’t. No judgment calls. And your key customers get their orders first.
Unfortunately, all too often the shipping priority schedule is made up on the fly with no business rules behind the decision, resulting in your best customers getting shorted. Make sure it doesn’t happen—implement a published shipping priority standard and then get your shipping platform to implement it for you. Your customers will thank you.
Ready to learn more about how you can revolutionize your enterprise shipping function? Check out the on-demand webinar, Seeing (Shipping) is Believing.
