Getting Your Picking and Packing Down Pat

Warehousing your products, as well as the pick and packing of stock is a crucial element of your operations, and you have to ensure that your eCommerce business is ready to fulfil orders when you begin to grow and expand.

Let’s start with defining Picking and Packing.

Basically put, picking and packing is the process of locating and pulling products from inventory locations and packing them into shipment containers to fulfil a customer order. The picking and packing process starts with receiving a customer order at the warehouse. Then promptly moves onto picking the items needed to fill the request, and quickly packing the items to schedule the delivery.

There are a number of available methods to manage this process, and it’s important that your business selects the right one to achieve operational efficiency, including ergonomic and warehousing considerations. But more importantly, it’s about being able to adapt to organisational change as your business evolves.

While your operation was smaller, your business was probably picking and packing small orders quite easily from a small location (maybe as small as your bedroom or garage) as they came in from your website, however one of the biggest challenges eCommerce businesses have occurs at the point where they hit the growth phase, and all of a sudden, product lines expand, orders surge and then the business can no longer fulfil the orders in a timely, acceptable manner.

Growing Your Operations

When your eCommerce business reaches that growth phase in the business lifecycle, you have to be ready to make the next step, and that may come in the form of expanding your warehouse capacity, increasing its size, expanding the workforce, and improving the systems used to assist the picking and packing method.

Tips On How To Get It Right

A good picking and packing system for your business can reduce labour costs and improve customer service through more effective fulfilment. Your process here can really make or break the business. As eCommerce improves and evolves, so does your customers’ expectations, and so your picking and packing should not be letting your service down. Here are a few tips:

1. Location: put the more popular items near the front of your warehouse, to reduce time it takes to collect.
2. Pairing Products: group common products close to each other for the same reason
3. Highly Trained Staff: greater expertise and knowledge will streamline the process
4. Physical Organisation: making your shelving and locations better suited to picking and packing will improve the process

How Can Invenco Help?

Warehouse picking and packing solutions are an essential part of your eCommerce business’ operations, and if your business is on the fast track, it may be time to investigate Third Party Logistics (3PL) solutions to capitalise on your opportunity, and not fall behind.

At Invenco, we believe in helping organisations like yours reach the next level, through expansion and the improvement of logistics efficiencies, saving you time and money. But every business is different. This is why we have created this Quiz, called the 3PL Benchmarking Tool, to help you figure out what solution best meets your business’ needs.

Click here to take the 3PL Quiz Now.