If you’ve been working in the order fulfillment industry for a while, you’ve probably heard about technology like chatbots, auto-email replies, barcode scanners, customer management software, robotics, and more. Automation is everywhere, and many of your competitors are taking full advantage of this technology to optimize their supply chain. If you want to learn more about how automated shipping can benefit your organization, here’s what you need to know.
What Is Automated Shipping?
Automated shipping is the automatic process of ensuring commercial shipping procedures are performed as new orders are placed. This includes picking items from inventory, packing boxes, and delivering packages to customers.
When it comes to fulfillment, speed is one of the major advantages that companies seek. With an automated shipping solution, you can automatically get orders in cue and eliminate several manual tasks involved in the process. You can introduce robots to take over manual tasks, add a layer of software to your system, or install conveyor belts to move products through the warehouse.
Benefits of Automated Shipping
Improved Order Accuracy Rate
An automated shipping system can significantly improve your order accuracy rate. It achieves this by automatically checking the existing cube and weight of a carton against the expected cube and weight of an order. If any carton that is processed shows that it is following outside of the expected range, it will be diverted for manual checking and reprocessing. In the long run, this translates to fewer errors, fewer returns, and happier customers who are more likely to stay loyal to your brand.
Increased Efficiency
Automated shipping systems lead to significantly faster turnarounds. Since tasks like packing, adhering shipping labels, and sorting or counting stock levels can be time-consuming when handled manually, automation can help you perform these tasks faster. A streamlined shipping process helps you increase production, which lets you cater to more orders in less time. The ultimate benefit of automation is that it helps you drive sales and boost your profits.
For example, you can use barcodes to speed up processes. As you scan items, it automatically updates counts and data in your warehouse management system. Similarly, you can send tracking information in real-time to your customers using GPS location on your delivery trucks.
Optimizes Supply Chain
The process of optimizing your supply chain aims to consolidate your data in one place. This makes it easier to track orders and manage inventory, and even provides you with data to improve demand forecasting.
Reduced Errors
An automated warehouse helps businesses fully integrate inventory management through the ERP (enterprise resource planning) system. This includes all fixed and current assets and goods available. Automation provides access to important information such as your customer address book, the introduction of fuel charges, and other types of automatic storage. With accurate and updated information such as this, it will help you eliminate significant errors that can be costly.
With manual data entering, the risk of errors is increasingly high. This can have many negative financial consequences especially as your business changes and grows. Some of the consequences of these errors include increased delivery costs, maintaining excessively high availability, improper planning and coordinating, future penalties for documentation errors, and more.
With the right freight management software, you can optimize your entire logistics business. You may be surprised to find out how many aspects of your operations can be integrated to bring peace of mind to your warehouse managers and your customers.
Cost-Effective Shipping
Automated shipping systems can help your business find significant reductions in shipping costs. This is a huge advantage for organizations that work in this industry because shipping costs tend to account for a huge percentage of total fulfillment costs. Some of the savings you will find through automation include the labour savings mentioned before, but also includes the benefit of fewer dimensional weight surcharges.
Automation reduces dimensional weight surcharges, thus keeping the costs lower. This is accomplished in numerous ways, but the most common method is cartonization. Cartonization is the process of using software to ensure that orders are shipped in the best sized packaging for the items inside. This ensures that shipments do not fail the dimensional weight calculation test.
If a shipment fails this test, it is flagged and redirected for repackaging into a more appropriately sized carton to eliminate or reduce the surcharge. Over time, these savings can have a major impact on your bottom line.
Choose Lean Supply Solutions to Automate Your Shipping
An automated shipping process can help your business grow and save money at the same time. Although automation is usually reserved for large enterprises, e-commerce merchants and small businesses that partner with third party logistics providers (3PLs) can access automation to help them save on shipping costs as their business grows.
At Lean Supply Solutions, you can benefit from quality and accurate software and automation solutions that help you make wiser decisions about optimizing your supply chain. Our Lean Methodology helps our clients eliminate any operations, equipment, personnel, or resources that do not add value to their supply chains. We do our best to ensure that you consistently deliver the right products to the right customers at the right time.
Ready to get long-term savings, customer satisfactions that deliver the best return on investment, lower operating costs, improved focus, high-end technology, and more? We’re here to help you. In addition to automated shipping, our services also include warehousing and distribution, pick and pack, repackaging, integrated solutions with companies like Amazon, labelling, online reporting, and transportation. You can trust us to provide consistent, predictable, and quality results. Contact us today!
