How to Streamline Order Management Automation for Maximum Efficiency

As e-commerce grows increasingly complex, businesses are focusing on optimizing their operations to stay competitive. Enhancing customer satisfaction has become a top priority, with strategies like offering competitive pricing, ensuring a seamless shopping experience, and streamlining order management processes taking center stage.

Efficient order management is crucial for achieving these goals, and automation takes it a step further, enabling businesses to reach their objectives faster and more effectively. To help you streamline your operations, we’ve created this guide on how to set up order management automation for your store. Let’s dive in!

What is Order Management Automation?

Order management automation takes operations that were once performed manually – for instance, updating the order status or arranging a delivery pick-up – and automates them.

This is extremely useful for businesses as it can speed up order processing, warehouse management and delivery organization.

You can also link order management automation with an API and other sources of information, to build a real-time view of business operations. This allows you to gain insights on how effective your processes are, and make changes to improve if needed.

What are the Benefits of Order Management Automation?

Before we explain how to automate order management, let’s look at why it’s worth the investment:

• Time and cost effective – By reducing how much manual input is required, workflows become quicker and orders reach their destination faster. Plus, the costs associated with time to process are reduced.

• Reduce manual errors – Order management automation reduces the risk of human error, decreasing the chance that orders will be missed. This helps keep customers happy, reduces catch-up work for your team, and avoids costs that would be incurred due to refunds or other forms of compensation.

• Improved order tracking – Having accurate, reliable tracking improves the customer experience as it helps ensure items are consistently delivered on time. Customers also appreciate the greater transparency that order tracking provides as it allows them to plan around deliveries, and feel reassured that their order is on its way.

• Greater integration – This is key for efficiency, as integrated systems have far fewer gaps that orders could get lost in. The automation ensures order information is readily accessible for both warehouse operatives and other teams should a problem arise. For instance, if something has gone wrong with a delivery partner, your customer service team will be able to see this in their customer retention and provide a resolution as soon as possible.

• Better inventory management – Having accurate order information means that popular items can be stocked more consistently both through space allocation and automated reordering. This reduces the chance that popular items will be out of stock, facilitating further sales. It also helps avoid over-ordering, meaning you don’t end up with stock you can’t sell taking up space you need for something else.

How to Streamline Order Management Automation? (Focus areas)

Now that we have looked at some of the primary benefits of order management automation, it’s time to look at some of the specific automation strategies that businesses can implement in order to streamline efficiency as much as possible.

The following processes are crucial for business owners who are looking to provide a boost to their order management capabilities. 

Focus area 1: Implement Picking Automation Strategies

Picking automation strategies take order data and work out the most efficient routes through the warehouse for pickers.

This enables pickers to get more work done in a given day, while also helping to optimize costs such as forklift fuel usage. Robotic operations can also be integrated to further reduce costs and help to increase profitability.

By automating picking, businesses can be confident that their warehouses are running as efficiently as possible, especially if robotic pickers have been implemented.

Focus area 2: Automate Label Creation and Returns Management

Order management automation can also streamline the creation of delivery labels and automatically print returns labels.

This means that human error is mostly eliminated from this process, as customer details are entered automatically.

You can combine this with address verification tools to avoid customers entering incorrect details too.

Returns services can also be automated, meaning that when an item is returned it is automatically added back into the stocklist so that it can be resold. This enables business owners to be comfortable in trusting their stock data and that returned products are quickly available for resale.

On the customer side of things, there’s a lower chance of miscommunication with customers over returned items, and the refund or exchange process goes more quickly. So not only are your operations more efficient, but you’re also improving the customer experience.

These techniques can apply to shipments of pallets between warehouses, as well as individual orders, and can be supported by the use of artificial intelligence for customer service.

Focus area 3: Automatic Shipping Organization

It’s not just the receipt of orders that can be ordered. The shipping process itself can be too.

For instance, couriers can be automatically arranged using a predefined set of criteria. This means that a business can easily book the cheapest courier from a pool of delivery companies, or send certain deliveries to a specialist if needed.

This increases efficiency while further reducing costs due to the fact that it replaces a function that is usually handled manually. By automating this function, businesses can find couriers more quickly than they otherwise would have, ensuring that this section of the workflow is streamlined.

Order management automation can also be linked up with the business API to perform functions like automating wholesale invoicing, a useful function for B2B sales operations.

Focus area 4: Real-Time Tracking

The final method for streamlining order management automation is real-time tracking – a feature that is exceedingly useful for businesses and very reassuring for customers.

Real-time tracking enhances the user experience by providing crucial data on the transit of items. This works by updating the location of an item based on barcode tracking – in other words, whenever the item is scanned by a picker, the location is automatically updated. This increases customer satisfaction as the delivery process becomes more transparent and customers can plan around the delivery of important items that need to be signed for.

Customers will also be notified (automatically) when the item is transferred from a business to the delivery courier. This means that should delivery be late due to problems faced by couriers, the customer can see that the business completed processes on their end in a timely fashion. This helps to protect the ties of brand loyalty between customers and businesses, which aids the retention of returning customers and creates a smooth customer shopping experience.

From a business and order management perspective, real-time tracking is crucial for maximizing efficiency since it enables warehouse operatives to track items at any stage during transit between warehouses. This reduces losses in profits due to missing or lost items, ensuring that stock can be accounted for.

4 Best Practices for Order Management Automation

If you want to make the most of order management automation, there are a few key best practices you should follow, including:

• Secure all customer data. Automation requires the processing of vast amounts of customer data, so it is essential that businesses have secure data management solutions in place. Data breaches can lead to legal issues and severe customer dissatisfaction, which can seriously damage brand reputation.

• Provide sufficient training. Sweeping changes to the workflow mean that staff retraining exercises will need to be implemented in order to assure quality. Warehouse operatives will need to have changes explained to them in detail, otherwise mistakes can creep in – derailing efficiency in the process.

• Review warehouse safety procedures. Large changes to the workflow can lead to new safety issues, such as the implementation of robotic pickers and new forklift routes. Safety precautions will need to be updated to ensure the wellbeing of employees. Plus, safety issues can damage brand reputation, lead to legal disputes and lower efficiency, so businesses must get on top of this.

• Regularly monitor and assess practices. Finally, businesses need to regularly monitor their workflow to ensure that any potential oversights made during the implementation of automation are ironed out. Automation is a big change, so regular reviews are important for reaching maximum efficiency.

Final Thoughts

Overall, order management automation provides numerous benefits to businesses that are looking to further streamline their warehouse operations. This provides businesses with an excellent foundation from which they can grow their reputation and fulfill increasingly more orders without experiencing many of the hiccups associated with rapid growth.