The take-off on the E-shopping spree driven by holiday cheer marked the festive seasons across the globe. In the month of the festive season, we expect online retailers to notch up cumulative sales to a great extent. The take-off in the E-shopping spree is further soared up by the mega sale events hosted by E-commerce giants.
E-commerce companies are bracing themselves for the onslaught of demand that will result from the holiday season and shopping spree. It’s an equally crucial time for the 3PLs and other logistics service providers to exploit this momentary window of opportunity.
Here’s how you can maximize sales and manage unprecedented levels of demand during this year’s festive season. You need to incorporate a warehouse management system that can help streamline your operations for smooth and efficient operations.
Here are some approaches one can use cloud-based WMS to prepare for the E-com tidal wave:
- Optimize your storage facilities to accommodate and hold additional stock in the same space. Also, reducing the need to rent extra space.
- Eliminates onerous and time-intensive paper-based processes in the warehouse. Give employees the time and flexibility to take on the sudden acceleration of operations.
- Focus on the Returns Process – The faster you can get returns shipped back and re-settled in your warehouse. The faster you can get the customer their money back and the faster will be the next order. You need to ensure that the consumer does not run out of the holiday mood before you can satisfy him with his preferred order. Also, you will better manage upcoming purchase orders with better anticipation of replenishment needs. Such software can also drive the transition from manual to digital returns tracking. Thus enabling a more accurate and automated way of tracing returned products through the warehouse.
- Stocking up with the help of demand forecasting techniques offered by the sophisticated WMS algorithms plays a critical role in exploiting the momentary demand gush. When all the competitors are trying to exploit the passing opportunities and consumers have the access to so many alternatives.
- Bringing on more employees may seem unnecessary when you can boost labor productivity by tracking, monitoring, and comparing various metrics to ensure that you met the required SLAs. With your current staff’s increased efficiency, you must have appropriate scheduling processes in place to ensure that you always have efficient staff in various key areas of operations.
- Higher-order volumes mean higher will be the rate of warehouse staff going back and forth for put-away, picking, and packing which ultimately leads to more chances of congestion, confusion, transaction error, damages, and lax quality checks. Travel path optimization is a critical functionality, especially during peak seasons.
By automating the operations with a cloud-based WMS you can cope up with the fundamental problems of managing the sudden surges of operations through optimum utilization of resources whilst reducing the additional costs and making the most out of the business opportunities concurrently.
