Ship Stage: How to Assess Your Operation's Efficiency
When considering a shipping solution, it’s important to begin by establishing a baseline understanding of your company’s current fulfillment operation. This baseline can provide clarity as to where you are losing money in the fulfillment process so you can focus on fixing what’s wrong, while substantially reducing your shipping costs.
Critical Ship Questions & Elements to Consider
Last week, we discussed the importance of the pack stage and this week, we’re going over an equally critical stage in the fulfillment process - the ship stage. During this stage there are a few critical questions to ask and elements to consider.
First up, does your current shipping process include an automated multi-carrier rate shopping software? This system allows for multiple carriers rates and service levels to be compared automatically through software.
In addition to automated rate shopping, is your operation using shipping rules to enforce standard procedures? With shipping software, rule based automation is used to enforce standard rule procedures for both carrier and service level customer orders.
Next, during the ship stage of your fulfillment process are you able to print shipping labels without weighing packages? With a shipping software solution you can leverage your data to skip manual fulfillment process steps, (e.g. verifying package weight by software rather than by weighing each package).
Important Ship KPIs to Track
In addition to considering these critical questions and elements, it’s equally important to understand the KPIs that can help you track the status of your fulfillment operation. For example, metrics specific to the ship stage can include:
- Percentage decrease in single carrier shipping spend by using regional/alternative carriers
- Packing slip and shipping label processing speed
The list of shipping questions and metrics worth considering doesn’t end here. To learn more about how you can establish a greater understanding of the ship component of your fulfillment operation and how to improve it going forward, take ShipHawk’s Fulfillment Scorecard assessment.
