Packaging and order fulfillment best practices?

[barracudacals]

Hello all,

We are a cottage industry home business and ship about 100 packages a week. We would like to reduce our shipping errors by improving procedures. We think we are being careful but there are inevitably errors in items or quantity on a small but significant number of our orders. Is there a online references for best practice for packaging for a small business like ours? (All of me searches resulted in how to save money using X shipping company)

All advice is welcome.

Thank you,

John

[vangogh]

Welcome to the forum John. I tried searching too and found much the same as you did. What kind of things do you ship and what kind of errors are you seeing? Maybe there's enough brainpower here to serve as the reference you're looking for.

[KristineS]

Probably Fed Ex and UPS would have some of the information for which you are looking. I know the USPS has a pretty extensive section on shipping and how to ship too. Those might be good places to start.

[barracudacals]

We ship after market parts for plastic models:

BarracudaStudios (http://barracudacals.com/)

There is a lot of similarity in the products (ie. four types of Spitfire wheels, six sheet of P-47 decals). Customers may order several of the same part and only one of another. We are "careful" wen pulling the parts and double check the invoices against the parts before closing up the box but one or two out of 50 orders will end up with a wrong quantity or a wrong part. This can be costly as about 50% of our business if overseas and the postage to ship out another piece starts to add up (not to mention the ill will for the customer).

We would like to get the "careful" out of the process and implement systems that make is hard to make a mistake. This is what we're hoping to find.


Thank you!

John

[barracudacals]

My reply has been held up in moderation all day. Is this because I included a link?

EDIT: This refers to the post above. Thanks!

[Steve B]

There isn't going to be a high tech "on-line" solution to this. As you know, it's a pretty simple concept to include the correct item and amount - the trick is in making it as methodical as possible to practically eliminate the slip-ups. I face a similar situation in delivering dog food to the customer's home. It's pretty elementary to load the correct bags, the correct amount of bags, and drive to the right houses and drop off the corresponding bag(s). But, we've made mistakes on each aspect several times. We've all but eliminated the mistakes by extensive checklists and everything gets verified two times. If I have any employees that think it's silly to check off a box to verify they are looking at the correct house number, then they can go work for someone else. The danger is when the boss (me) does it and thinks he can take a short cut because he knows what he's doing!

[mailorder]

I ship around 65 orders a week and around 150 a week around most holidays.

I print out the orders and staple the shipper label together. I fill one box at a time tossing the orders in the box. Once I fill all my orders I sit down at the table and pull everything out of the box, check the order, check the shipper label, crumble up some news paper, stick shipper label on box, and tape shut.

A few times a year I will send out the wrong item to someone. Most of the time it's not worth my hassle to get the item returned and I’ll send out the correct item the next day. It's a huge pain for the customer to fix my issues.

[vangogh]

My reply has been held up in moderation all day. Is this because I included a link?

Yep and because I didn't notice the post sooner. Sorry about that. A few more posts and the ones with links won't go to moderation.

I think Steve is right that being more careful really is the solution. Have another person check the first or have someone dedicated to checking everyone. Looking through your products could you rename the part numbers. I realize they're similar items, but could the part numbers be changed to be more different? That might make it easier to recognize when something is mistakenly pulled and added to an order.

How about some kind of scanning equipment. It might be overkill for you, but do the products have bar codes or similar? I'm guessing not. Maybe looking into some kind of system where product labels are scanned and compared to an invoice could work. My initial thought is it will be too expensive, though it's probably worth looking into.

Maybe it won't be so expensive after all. I'm searching now and there seem to be a number of barcode scanner apps for the iPhone and iPad. It looks like there are some for Android phones too. Here's a video of someone who's using a database program to record inventory (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjWa5pw_wQA) on his iPad. There might be some way you can set a smart phone to keep track of inventory and possibly compare the items pulled to an invoice that's also created on the phone.

[barracudacals]

All good ideas. Keep 'em coming.

We often don't have two people in the room to check the orders but I do like the idea of checking the contents after is has been put in the box and before it gets a shipping label. This would mean three checks of the contents - pulling, checking off the invoice and a last look before the tape gun. A second set of eyes whenever possible for larger orders where there might be quantity mistakes is a good idea.

Changing the product names seems like a good idea too. They are WAY too similar. A BR32003 and a BC32003 look a lot alike when you're in a hurry. The rub is changing packaging and the names in the databases and messing up totals for past sales records.

Thank you,

John

[vangogh]

The names and product numbers look so similar that I can see it causing problems when checking. It's so easy to read what you think you see rather than what's really there. That's why another set of eyes could help, though it's understandable if it's not always possible. Maybe you can set a price where anything above has to be checked by at least 2 people before the order can go out. That might help.

Do you have barcodes of similar on the products? If so I think some kind of system for scanning could help too.

It's probably inevitable that some orders will go out incorrectly. I doubt you can prevent it 100%, but if you could reduce the 2 out of 50 to 1 out of 50 and then 1 out of 100 and so on it'll certainly help.

[KristineS]

I definitely recommend having one person pack the order and another person check it before the box is closed. It is so easy for one person to see what they want to see, especially if they're pulling a lot of orders at once. Adding a fresh pair of eyes to the mix can really help eliminate mistakes.

[vangogh]

I keep thinking of the checking like proofreading. No matter how many times one person proofs copy they inevitably miss something. After reading the same thing a few times your mind just sees the right spelling to certain words even though they're spelled wrong. Sometimes a second pair of eyes is necessary to catch everything.

I'd look into scanners though. Some of the apps make it look like an inexpensive option. You'd need a bluetooth scanner, but a quick search is showing some under $200. There's probably a solution in there. It might cost a little something to get the right setup, but if it saves you money on incorrect orders it should pay for itself before too long.

[billbenson]

My products are drop shipped from a large manufacturer. They weigh the package and so does UPS or whatever shipper. When I have had customer complaints for items not shipped, they go back to weights. They know the weight of everything that goes into the box as well as the box.

You could add to your process weighing each package. Unless your products are very light, I would think you could catch a lot of errors that way. You could automate it further by having what the total weight should be on the packing slip to confirm you are close in weight.

Just an idea.

[greenoak]

i would probably put in one more check point if it was a repeating problem...and look a little harder at the whole system....

[barracudacals]

Thanks all,

I think we are going to have the shipper take a third look before taping up the box and, when possible have a second person check the order, especially when it's a big one. I'll report back after a good test.

John

[Georgias Gifts]

John,
I have the new Inc. 500 List magazine and there was a section on companies for Logistics & Transportation. Might be worth contacting some of them and if they can't help maybe they can refer someone.

[BeTheBest]

I hear the pain! Just a suggestion that shouldn't make you change your entire database. Can you change the LABELS on the products?? By that, I mean insert some '-' dashes to break up the numbers. All the numbers crunched together make it difficult.

As an example:

BR32003 and a BC32003

Change to:
BR-3-2003 and a BC-3-2003

Don't know if that will work for you... but I think breaking it up like that makes the differences a little easier to spot!

Hope that helps! Good luck!

[RobertL]

Hi John,
I run a fulfillment business and we have virtually zero defects on our side. Sometimes the client or the courier messes up but that's another story. The way we have accomplished this is by using out own in-house software. If you use off-the-shelf software you are guaranteed to have things mess up some times. If you create the code you are in full control, it's the only way.
If you're organized and structured and make your own code everything will work.

[Bobjob]

There must be something in the air. I normally make two mistakes a year, so far this year I've made about ten. Plus my customers have made about ten as well. It could be the layout of your shop, the layout on the packing list, it could be anything. You can always charge your employees the freight for the mistake. That might help them with finding out what the problem is and remedying it. It sounds like being careless.

[RobertL]

Consider paying a quality engineer to come and look at your operations for a couple of hours and make a simple assessment. Shouldn't run you more than a couple of hundred, and it might fix your problem. Best and cheapest might be a close to graduation industrial engineering student at a nearby university, they always have the time and their very eager to do these types of projects. Sounds like there's something fundamentally wrong and they can pinpoint it.