As a busy eCommerce retailer, you’re probably acutely aware of the “Monday Rush.” Those 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” AM and your warehouse staff is faced with their biggest pick, pack and ship day of the week.
What’s even worse is the 3-day weekend “Tuesday Rush.” Add in the upcoming “Black Friday,” “Cyber Monday” and the rest of the upcoming holiday seasonal rush, and it’s easy to see how bogged down warehouse systems can get!
Well, thank heavens 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. 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. 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, new products, warehouse expansion or any other number of factors.
Studies have shown that a single warehouse pick, pack or ship error can cost you $38 to correct! 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 that your experienced warehouse workers quit, or they go on vacation or they call in sick. What happens during the holiday season when volume increases and every warehouse employee is working as hard as they can? What if (we all wish for this problem) your order volume goes up and doesn’t come down? Overtime? Temp employees?
What if you could:
- Increase your warehouse efficiencies so 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 important packing and shipping duties to more experienced employees?
- 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. 10 that can give you all these benefits and more.
Advanced Barcode Systems, LLC d.b.a. Barcoders.com has released a WMS for Freestyle MOM 10 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 is given to determine the correct item has been picked. If wrong, the picker can then make the correction, putting back the wrong item and selecting the correct one, with minimal labor time involved. Pick error avoided, $38 saved.
Greater efficiency is 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 efficiencies 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.
Learn more and see a complete list of the currently available Barcoders modules, or contact Freestyle Solutions today!
