When weekend surges come in and your warehouse needs to rush to fulfill and ship orders out, you need to be as efficient and smooth as possible.

But what’s the best way to do that?

More importantly, should you really care?

Allow us just give you a resounding yes!

Studies have shown that one single warehouse pick, pack or ship order error can cost an average of almost $40.

Learn how to avoid costly errors, process, and ship as effectively and efficiently as possible. (Hint: Your WMS is a big piece of the puzzle.)

As a busy eCommerce retailer, you’re probably very familiar with the “Monday Rush.”

The orders that have been accumulating since they were completed and paid for on your eCommerce platform Friday afternoon, all day Saturday, all day Sunday AND early Monday morning.

Now it’s “Monday Rush” and your warehouse workers are faced with their largest pick, pack and ship day of the week.

What’s even worse is the 3-day weekend “Tuesday Rush.”

To add on to that it’s the upcoming “Black Friday,” “Cyber Monday” and the rest of the up-and-coming holiday seasonal rush, and it’s easy to see how bogged down warehouse systems can get.

Well, thank goodness for your experienced warehouse workers. They know what they’re doing, they’re very familiar with your product and they know the layout of your warehouse, right?

They’ve been through a lot of Monday or Tuesday Rushes, and you have a high level of confidence that the backlog of orders will get out the door with little or no errors. Thank goodness.

Besides, you probably pay them more for this extra knowledge and experience, right?

But the fact is: even the most experienced, seasoned, high-paid warehouse employees make errors, especially when greater pressure is put on them because of larger volumes of orders, new products, warehouse expansion or any other number of factors.

Remember when we mentioned that a single error may very well cost up to just about $40 on average?

And these are just the errors that customers report.

What if you send out too many of an item, or a more expensive item than was ordered?

Will you hear back from the customer? Probably not.

Then there are those times when your experienced warehouse workers decide to quit, or they go on vacation or they call in sick.

What happens during the holiday season when sales volume increases and every warehouse employee is working as hard as they can already?

What if (we all wish for this problem) your order volume goes up and doesn’t come down?

Overtime? Temporary employees? What if you could:  

  • Increase your warehouse efficiencies so that current staff could process more orders AND make fewer errors.

 

  • Hire inexperienced permanent or temporary employees, give them a half hour of training and confidently turn ALL the picking duties over to them, leaving the more critical packing and shipping duties to more seasoned employees, pardon the pun.

 

  • Keep track of all your warehouse employee’s productivity.

 

Enter the Warehouse Management System (WMS).

Today there is available a WMS for Freestyle’s M.O.M. 11 that can give you all these beneficial functionalities and much more.

Advanced Barcode Systems, LLC d.b.a. Barcoders.com has released a WMS for Freestyle MOM 11 that can help you immediately.

For example, our RFPick module uses a portable scanner to help the employee pick orders.

The scanner will guide the picker through the warehouse, location by location, asking the picker to pull the item and scan the barcode/UPC.

Immediate audio and visual feedback are given to determine that the correct item has been picked.

If incorrect, the picker can then make the correction, putting back the wrong item and selecting the correct one, with minimal labor time involved for said employee.

Pick error avoided, $38 saved.

Greater efficiencies are also achieved since the scanner speeds up the hunt-and-find process and the pick-correct-item process.

Looking at the scanner helps the employee avoid all those back-and-forth glances at the paper picking list.

Additional efficiency can be gained by using our RFMulti Pick module.

This program allows the pickers to simultaneously pick AND sort up to 100 orders while making only one pass through the warehouse, gaining as much as 43% efficiency over current manually picked, sorted, and packed orders.