In a typical year, suppliers and their warehouses have ample time to reset and prepare for the big holiday rush, but 2020 has thrown the supply chain industry for a loop. Consumers have required nonstop shipment of both essential and non-essential items even through Covid and shelter in place regulations, leaving the industry to balance remaining open while still prepping for this year’s holiday rush.

According to Forbes, as life begins to adapt to this new normal, the logistics industry has risen to the occasion to meet consumer demands, but should review the data before settling back into its old normal. Most supply chain business continuity plans are built upon data from the past with little to no consideration of challenges that could arise, making it virtually impossible to plan accordingly for when challenges like the pandemic happen. 

As warehouses continue to evolve, manual operations will simply not cut it. Even if your warehouse seems efficient and manually is able to accept and process tens of hundreds of orders each day from your sales channels –automation through a software like OPAL will make the warehouse more efficient, instead of serving as the organization’s bottleneck to achieving timely shipments and higher revenue levels goals.

How OPAL Clients Succeed in Warehouse Efficiency
Most warehouses simply are not capable of manually processing the incoming volume of pallets AND picking, packing and shipping the tens of hundreds of drop ship orders– it is incredibly labor intensive.  To overcome this, selecting a simplified approach through software automation allows your warehouse to efficiently pick, pack and ship and optimize warehouse productivity.

OPAL simplifies the backend fulfillment and creates picklists, packing slips, shipping labels, UCC129 labels and Bills of Lading for you — all without human intervention to save a great deal of time and reduce human error.

Improving warehouse efficiency is a core benefit to partnering with OPAL and will provide your warehouse with the following productivity enhancements, just to name a few: 

1. Picklists that route pickers through the warehouse in the most efficient manner – drastically minimizing time and motion in the pick process. 
2. Picklists that pick the items in the business priority required based on carrier arrival times or sales channel priority.
3. Scanning during the pick process to ensure the right item is being picked and inventory is being decremented accurately in real-time.
4. Scanning during the shipment process to ensure that all item orders are accurate, none have been missed and tracking numbers are being sent to your sales channels in real-time.

Introducing OPAL software into a warehouse is proven to increase productivity by as much as 50%, significantly improving your chances for achieving shipments and the realized revenue goals desired.

Simplify with OPAL’s 4-in-1 Software Solution
EDI | Order Management |Warehouse Management | Shipping

OPAL is the innovative solution to simplify your business fulfillment needs in today’s rapidly transforming retail world.  To learn more, click here! 

Click here to book your customized demo today.  We are here to support you through this time of change and are here to help you innovate and thrive!

All aboard as 2020 is coming to a close and things are so different from how anyone forecasted them at the end of 2019! 

The pandemic has turned the world upside down with e-commerce sales drastically escalating and brick and mortar sales diminishing. This is causing a huge operational shift for suppliers by minimizing the number of pallet shipments out each month, which translates to an extraordinary number of small parcels out each day.

In fact, 2020 e-commerce sales are projected to have yet another record-breaking year.  Even retailers are rethinking their business model, seeking to reduce the number of distribution centers owned and asking their suppliers to do smaller drop shipped orders directly to stores so they’re not carrying excess inventory in these uncertain times. 

With the 2020 holiday season already sailing, and it’s not even Halloween yet, surveys show that consumers expect both fast and free delivery still, despite the supply chain challenges due to Covid and social distancing demands (ZD Net). However, 30% of consumers are planning to start holiday shopping earlier for fear of not getting what they want if they wait until after Thanksgiving.

Evolving shopping habits and tighter consumer and business budgets have also led to companies rolling out holiday cyber sales in mid-October and Amazon hosting its Prime Day then to clear space for holiday inventory.

It’s going to be an extremely difficult and intense workload for suppliers and warehouses supporting their retailers over the next few months as order volumes ramp up.  Unfortunately, suppliers’ options for efficiency are limited this close to the holiday shipping craze and other than hiring and training additional seasonal workers, it is best to work as efficiently as possible with processes currently in place and start 2021 off by simplifying with software.

Get Ready for 2021 with OPAL
This next year can be significantly better by partnering with OPAL to automate your order fulfillment systems.  Our customer testimonials say it all:

• We dramatically reduced processing time per order (measured from time we took shipping labels off the printer to posting payments in A/R). Our end to end processing time was reduced to 2 to 2.5 minutes per transaction vs 10-12 mins before OPAL.

• We have been able to scale the business without adding staff. In the pre-OPAL days we were handling approximately 200 orders a week with much effort and labor costs.  With Opal we’ve been able to increase our business and now we regularly process over 1,000 orders weekly with the staff redeployed to sales generation activities rather than order processing efforts.

• We have benefited tremendously from the automation OPAL provides. From an order processing standpoint, the system automatically generates labels and pick lists, making our fulfillment process highly efficient. Our team is now able to process more orders in less time than before. The automation also provides peace of mind, as our team is unable to fulfill the same order twice, or fulfill an order with the wrong item. Inventory tracking is also much easier. The system is able to record bin locations so our warehouse team is able to easily find and pick items from inventory. 

• Our process has been streamlined to a very user-friendly system. We have been able to add partners and customization is available if the need arises.  We have grown our business tremendously without having to add staff to process orders.

Simplify with OPAL’s 4-in-1 Software Solution
EDI | Order Management |Warehouse Management | Shipping

OPAL is the innovative solution to simplify your small to mid-sized to enterprise business fulfillment needs in today’s rapidly transforming retail world. 

To learn how to make your eCommerce business scalable with OPAL, click here!

Click here to book your customized demo today.  We are here to support you through this time of change and are here to help you innovate and thrive!