Warehouse operations, the picking, packing, and shipping of books is a key operational area for many publishers.
Many book publishing software packages can help publishers to achieve greater operational efficiencies and lower costs in this this area.
Example 1:
Your warehouse staff may take an invoice and walk from location 100 to 4 to 101 to 5 to 200 to pick an order. This takes 15 minutes time.
If they used an invoice that sorted titles by location they would walk from location 4 to 5 to 100 to 101 to 200. The time taken would be reduced to 8 minutes.
The savings? Orders are picked 50% faster. This means that your order backlog is reduced, sales go up, and customers receive their books sooner.
Example 2:
Many publishers, with their own warehouse operation, use a UPS or FedEx shipping manifest system. This requires their shipping staff to enter the customer name and address.
Many publishing software packages can send this invoice information electronically to the the UPS or FedEx system. The shipping clerk uses a barcode reader to scan a barcode on the invoice. The shipping manifest system automatically retrieves the shipping address and shipping method (standard, 2 day, 1 day) and prints the label. The tracking code is returned to the publishing software and updates the invoice record.
The savings? Shipping labels are generated in 1 minutes not 4 minutes and keyboard errors are eliminated. Orders are processed faster and they arrive at the right destination shipped via the right method. The customer service clerks have immediate access to the tracking codes for the shipment.
