Black Friday and Cyber Monday seem to attain larger status each year as retailers prepare and warehouse and fulfillment personnel brace for the onslaught. This is the time of year warehouse and fulfillment employees wait for each year and have to be fully prepared.
Is your warehouse ready for the Black Friday/Cyber Monday extended holiday weekend?
Shawn Burwell, manager of operations and fulfillment for Jockey International, says, ideally, the volume seen on Black Friday is something “you have seen throughout the year during email or catalog spikes. What’s different now is you have 5-6 days in a row.”
Here are Burwell’s warehousing tips for Black Friday/Cyber Monday:
1.) Make sure inbound receiving put away is 100% clean going into Thanksgiving Day.
2) Look at the marketing calendar and make sure you have slotted promotional items. Create isolated zones or pick areas for items you know will be HOT.
3) Don’t let your shipping/manifest areas become bottlenecks. If this process is not automated, create additional manifesting stations to accommodate volume.
4) Make sure your carriers know your increased volume, or schedule multiple pick up times if it’s not part of your normal schedule.
5) Make sure your staffing agency is on call and you have someone ready to react when you need additional help. This is critical seeing people are on vacation this weekend.
6) Communication: Make sure the entire team knows where their performance is. How many orders have we shipped, how many do we need to ship? Are we behind, ahead? Do everything you can to keep morale high.
Jim Tierney is a senior writer for Multichannel Merchant. You can connect with him on Twitter (TierneyMCM) and LinkedIn, or call him at 203-358-4265.