Uh Oh, We cocked up! Not Sending Out enough stock!

I always like to disclose when we’ve had some issues in our warehouse. That way we can share what’s cropped up, then hopefully provide some resolutions that you guys can swipe and deploy so you don’t face the same issues in the future.

Being straight up, this is an area that I thought we had licked. It seems pretty straightforward and one that shouldn’t really happen, alas, it’s reared it’s ugly head and we needed to come up with a solution pretty swiftly!

ISSUE - We’ve had one or two incidents where our warehouse staff haven’t sent out enough stock to customers in their orders.

If it happens once, it can be forgiven (just about!) but itwe had a spate of incidents of this cropping up so it needed to be addressed.

As we’ve become busier we’ve taken on some new staff lately, so this may have been the issue. However, I don’t like to point the finger…. Blame the process, not the person!

When we discussed this with the staff, it transpired that there wasn’t a ‘standard’ process in place for picking and packing. Everybody was doing things their own way, to what suited their style of working best. I’m all for encouraging new ways of working but if it means that issues crop up as a result, then a standard operating procedure needs to be put in place.

We found that some warehouse staff preferred picking orders one by one, whereas others would pick orders using a picking list (a covering list that would have 10 orders worth of stock to pick rather than one). There were valid arguments for both but the resolution was to use a picking list to combat our issue. The main reason was that it allows several opportunities to flag the issue. Here’s why;

Opportunity 1) If we printed off a covering picking sheet, using a brightly coloured highlighter, staff would be able to highlight any SKUs that needed more than a quantity of one… a clear visual indicator to pick the correct number of items when going round the warehouse

Opportunity 2) Secondly, when the items were brought pack to the packing desk, when an order was needed, the warehouse operator could ensure all items were accounted for when allocating the stock to each order ( a second bite at the cherry!)

Opportunity 3) When the order is scanned, the packer then gets the opportunity to both count and scan the correct number of items. Three bites at the cherry!

Extra Brucey Bonus - This may not be for everybody so apologies if your warehouse management software can accommodate this - If you use Shopify for your order processing, you can use Shopfy flow’s built in automation feature to tag any order that contains a SKU with a quantity of more than one. Super handy! So if you have an item with a quantity of 2 for example, Shopify can automatically tag the order with something like “Check Quantity". This becomes really powerful if your WMS can read this tag and then generate a warning message to your packers if an order has this tag. Like i say, it’s pretty niche stuff and not every WMS may have this as a feature but super handy and useful if it does.

P.S. This tagging system can be super powerful for marketing too! More on that in another blog.

Til then… see ya down the aisles!!