Zenventory

Ground Delivery Maps

Monday, January 16. 2012

It's a the dirty little secret that UPS and FedEx don't want you to know about.....or is it? Did you know that you can achieve next day delivery by using UPS or FedEx Ground? Yup that's right! In many cases a ground package will get to its destination in one day GUARANTEED. In fact by using the ground delivery map you'll notice that ground packages can get to their destination for the most part between 1 and 5 days. This is very useful knowledge whan comparing next day air, second day air, and three day shipments to ground shipping. By doing so you can save several dollars on overnight and second day air packages.

Typically warehouses are in the know about this. But you shouldn't leave this to the warehouse to make the decision. These rules should be built into your busines systems. For example, our solutions automatically rate shop and provide a list of carrier services that will meet a specified delivery date.

Perhaps the biggest offender of overspending on shipping is the office worker unfamilar with delivery comparison. Giving office workers the capability to prepare shipments from their desktop is a license to spend money. So if you're going to do this, ensure that business rules are enforced through your business systems. Most carrier provided systems don't offer this level of control. Ensure your range of shippers from office staff to warehouse operators use systems with business controls built in.

Get you ground delivery maps here:

http://www.fedex.com/grd/maps/ShowMapEntry.do

http://www.ups.com/maps

Posted by Dale Swanson in Zenventory at 16:31 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

Grouping Shipments Fast Order Fulfillment

Tuesday, January 10. 2012

If you're the type of company that ships mostly the same type of item or perhaps you have batches of shipment that are similar, a batch shipping module in your order fulfillment process might just be the ticket. Our objective is to process shipping labels for multiple, nay, hundreds of packages with a few clicks, than collect the labels from our printer and apply them to the packages.

To determine routing and shipping rates, carriers are primarily concerned with four main factors ; delivery location, dimension, weight, and contents. So for batch shipment processing we need to ensure that the packaging and weight are all the same. The contents may be different as long as no special services need to applied to any particular package i.e declared value. It's ok to apply a special service to a batch process. Just remember that in the batch we assume all packages will get the same special service. For example, it's ok to ship 100 smart phones to 100 different customers and to add declared value (insurance) to each one for $200.00. That means that each package in this shipment have the same packaging, same weight, and same value. Some may have different versions of phones but it doesn't change the weight or value (for shipping purposes). Some systems can print separate packing slips and shipping labels. In many cases it's even more clever to have the packing slip and shipping label combined in one document.

So a batch shipping process might flow like this in Zenventory:

100 customers order Samsung Galaxy S2 Cell Phones

1. Group the cell phone orders for picking and packing in Zenventory.

2. Print the picking slips.

3. Pick the phones into the boxes.

4. Pack verify the orders in Zenventory.

5. Group the packed orders for shipment processing in Zenventory.

6. Acknowledge the weight and special services.

7. Press ship and collect your combination packing slips/shipping labels.

8 Distribute them throughout the packages.