Listaso Blog

Inventory Management: Best Practices For The Pick, Pack, And Ship Process

The key to good inventory management is an accurate and fast order fulfillment process. This process involves every step from pulling product from your inventory and packaging it to shipping it to your clients. 

Carmen Canas vicepresident and cofunder of Listaso
B2B Specialist

Ace Inventory and Warehouse Management 

 

The key to good inventory management is an accurate and fast order fulfillment process. This process involves every step from pulling product from your inventory and packaging it to shipping it to your clients. 

 

But how can the process of picking, packing, and shipping make a big difference in the efficiency of your distribution business? The answer is simple: The faster you can complete the process, the happier your clients will be, and the bigger you can grow your business as a result.

 

Warehouse Management Saves Time and Money

 

For distribution businesses, doing the pick, pack, and ship process without a warehouse-management system of some kind would be a terrible waste of time and money. 

 

If your warehouse workers don’t know where the items are located, they will end up wandering the aisles over and over, trying to find each product listed on the order, leading to delayed shipment and unhappy clients. Imagine the unfortunate amount of wasted time and money you have for every order your workers need to pick, pack, and ship.

 

A great warehouse-management solution can tell you exactly where every item of your inventory is located, boosting the efficiency of your inventory-management operations.

 

To make things even more efficient, imagine going into the warehouse to pick inventory for four or five different sales orders, and doing it without backtracking or wandering the same aisle multiple times. This is how picking should be done.

 

Avoid Mistakes in Your Pick, Pack, and Ship Process 

 

Picking is one of the most intensive processes within the warehouse, and it’s also one of the most likely to result in a mistake. Distribution businesses lose money when orders are shipped and something was missed, or the wrong item was picked. 

 

Order and transfer picking can be the most time-consuming and delicate part of warehouse management. While it may not seem that way, every order and transfer needs to be 100% accurate, 100% of the time.

 

You may also face challenges when it comes to the packing and shipping process, especially if you manage bundles or packs of products. Multi-packs and bundles made up of multiple single products often cause issues in the number of items sent in an order. The direct cost to your business of sending an incorrect quantity may not be as great as sending the wrong product, but it will put your stock figures out, which is another shipping error to be aware of. 

 

With a good system, each sales order can quickly be double-checked with a barcode scanner to ensure that what is being picked, packaged, and shipped is exactly what was ordered.

  

A Great Solution for Distribution Businesses

 

One of the best and most affordable inventory-management solutions for wholesalers or distributors is Listaso. With Listaso Inventory Management, you can:

  • See a full list of orders to choose which one to pick, and arrange them by truck, if necessary, for easy loading
  • Display item location, code, UPC, qty. needed, and qty. in stock
  • Check items picked and make sure they match the order
  • Send picked orders directly to your Accounting Software or our web portal, BackOffice, within seconds
  • Go digital and eliminate printed pick tickets by keeping them all on a handheld mobile device
  • Reduce human error by allowing warehouse workers to scan barcodes to automatically enter data instead of having to do it by hand

 

In Conclusion

 

Pick and pack errors can negatively impact the reputation of your business. Since order fulfillment is one of the last links in the supply chain, any errors during warehouse picking activities, if not detected, will directly impact customer satisfaction and disrupt revenue streams.

 

If you have not optimized your pick, pack, and ship process, your business is probably losing money on missed sales, providing a poor customer experience, and committing errors in shipping.

 

Instead of letting the pick, pack, and ship process remain slow and time-consuming, automate this task with a B2B Inventory Management Solution such as Listaso. 

 

Are you ready to reduce picking and packing errors? Schedule your Free Demo now!

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