Manual vs. Automatic Order Fulfillment

Order fulfillment includes picking, packing, and shipping products to customers. There’s a manual way and an automatic way to handle order fulfillment, and we’re going to go see which one delivers the right results for your company.

Manual:

Under a manual order fulfillment system, workers have to keep an eye out for incoming orders from customers. Then they have to hunt for products on the shelves in the warehouse, try to fit them into a shipping container, contact a shipper to get price quotes, and finally get the shipment out the door.

Problems:

All of these things can lead to inefficiency. Orders might be missed in the shuffle, delaying their fulfillment. Warehouse workers will spend a lot of time searching through the warehouse rather than doing batch order picks. Then they won’t know what to expect in terms of shipping costs until they go to a shipper’s website or call them to ask for pricing.

Automatic:

The picking, packing, and shipping processes are all much faster with the help of an automation platform. Workers are alerted as soon as a sales order is received, and they can then automatically generate batch picking lists, pick the parts off the shelf, and get price quotes from a number of shippers before finally selecting one and getting the order out the door.

Solutions:

It’s much better to have warehouse workers get updated immediately when a purchase order comes in. Getting the right products into the right containers and shipped to the right locations goes faster and smoother when a company has the right tools. There’s nothing left to say about it!