The rise of the eCommerce market globally has brought about a new change in the consumer attitude. Customers are now prioritising convenience shopping, and its new standards have sent supply chains scrambling to make changes. This new change in attitude has both advantages and disadvantages. While a small inventory hiccup can cause one to lose money, small productivity boosts can gain valuable customers. So how exactly does one change themselves to reap the benefits?
Easy. Logistics professionals and supply chains can optimally increase operational efficiency by using their equipment, assets, human resource, workflows, and product handling.
One needs better visibility to increase workflow efficiency, resulting in faster deliveries to customers. Here is the easy 4-step guide to optimizing eCommerce fulfillment for increasing workflow efficiency.
Step 1 – Understanding Supply Chain Efficiency Improvement and Visibility Strategies
Industry partners are now working with service-level agreements thanks to increased dependency on omnichannel logistics. Their main focus is to provide customers with products within the promised timeframe. This can be easily done by understanding the following three improvement strategies to enhance partner collaboration during the supply chain –
Providing workers with modern mobile technology
Workflow automation in eCommerce to manage front-line inventory
Adhere to global data capture standards
Step 2 – Provide Workers With Modern Mobile Technology
One has to provide their workers with modern mobile technology to help capture and utilise data during every step of the eCommerce fulfilment process. This will also provide you with reliable inventory visibility anytime you require it. You can also extend this visibility to provide better communication and forecasting to your selling channels, suppliers, and vendors.
Step 3 – Automation of Workflow To Manage Front-line Inventory
Providing your front-liner workers with the power to manage and view inventory is crucial to an optimized and successful fulfillment for eCommerce operations. This will provide the supply chain operators with better room to improve their accuracy.
One can use captured data to analyze and track the utilization and movement of inventory to provide real-time decisions through different areas of your fulfilment plant or warehouse. This can be achieved by enabling automation by providing new applications like Radio Frequency Identification. It can improve inventory accuracy and visibility by almost 99%.
Step 4- Adhere to Global Data Capture Standards
The meaning of delivery optimization and fulfillment in eCommerce refers to providing customers with their products the same day they order them. This can be achieved by better collaboration with industry partners while achieving real-time supply chain visibility. Here, capturing and using data with global data standards can be immensely helpful.
The advantages of using global data capture standards cover all be it easily identifying products along with the changes in item-level data capture as well as the chain of custody. It also helps in better data analysis which in turn helps to understand more information and data without taking part in complex conversion exercises.
Stepping Into The Future
Already business organisations have started placing well-planned omnichannel strategies, including order fulfilment technology solutions, front-line inventory management to increase the visibility of supply chain activities. This leads to a seamless collaboration among the different departments of your business – buyers, suppliers, third-party logistics providers, wholesalers, manufacturers, and distribution channels.
Thus it is clear that with the help of global data capture standards, the modernization of technology has become an important step to bring a greater level of collaboration to meet the new order-fulfillment and omnichannel requirements.