How Much is Your Slow Shipping System Costing You?

When you want to reduce warehouse labor and shipping costs, your shipping system’s processing speed is the first place to look. Slow shipping systems bog down the entire fulfillment operation and limit how many orders you can process in a day – but they also cause staff to wait idly between tasks – adding more costs to your staffing budget.

Managers ask, “How do I know if I have a slow system?”

The next time you go to the warehouse floor, watch your staff ship packages. The shipping process, for many companies, often looks like this:

• The shipping station employee receives the package
• Reads and applies the shipping instructions
• Makes any changes, if needed
• Scans a barcode or presses the SHIP key on the system
• Waits for the shipping label to print

What is Fast Shipping Time?

• In many operations, the shipping process described above can often take 1 minute or more.
• The total shipping time, including printing, with an optimized shipping system, can be as quick as 3 to 5 seconds.

Every additional second the employee waits for a shipping label to print slows shipment throughput and drives up labor costs. Add up all those seconds wasted over 8 hours a day, over 260 to 360 shipping days a year, and you’ll be surprised how much employee “wait” time you are paying for.

The more shipments you process, the quicker those costs add up. For some companies, the excess labor cost incurred due to waiting time equals a full-time employee’s salary or more.

Suppose your warehouse operation uses several individual carrier-provided systems to process shipments rather than a centralized multi-carrier shipping platform to manage all their carriers. In that case, your warehouse labor costs will drastically increase.

How to Accelerate Shipping and Reduce Labor Costs

The process becomes fast and simple with a new multi-carrier shipping system such as InfoShip®/Vx, which can seamlessly receive electronic orders and shipping instructions from the host system. The shipping workstation employee:

• Scans a barcode
• The label prints

It’s effortless, lightning fast, and consistently accurate. All decisions and data-entry tasks are removed from the process. The time savings you gain make it possible to quickly scale up to handle a much larger volume of orders with less staff.

Implementing the InfoShip®/Vx shipping system allows many customers to handle peak-season shipping volumes without adding extra shifts or temporary labor.

Contact us today if you’d like CLS to help you quantify the savings you’d gain by upgrading to a multi-carrier parcel shipping system integrated to receive order data in real-time from your host ERP, order management, or warehouse management system.

Learn More

Five Ways to Reduce Unexpected Carrier Back Charges
Four Proven Ways to Reduce Shipping Costs

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Rick Williams, President and CEO of Creative Logistics Solutions (CLS), is a shipping systems technology expert with advanced experience in e-commerce business fulfillment, B2B and B2C order fulfillment, parcel transportation management, and shipping operations. CLS helps companies automate shipment processing for domestic and international commerce, increase warehouse productivity, and reduce labor costs by eliminating manual tasks, improving processes, and reduce shipping costs with InfoShip™/Vx, its multi-carrier shipping software platform.

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