Sometimes a strategy to pump growth can work so well it creates one of those “good problems”. So what do you do when discounting an item for Black Friday/Cyber Monday catapults your order volume into multiples of your typical warehouse traffic?
We pulled out the Post-It notes and started building a process and work flow for our flexed up team (non-warehouse HQ folks and seasonal hires) to hit the ground running. We mapped the steps from delivery to our warehouse to ready to be shipped to our customers. We built stations for each step. The focus was on distilling everything that had to be done into bite-size morsels. There was no existential knowledge that we had to communicate, which kept things straight forward, but accurate and timely order shipping was crucial.
Product pictures to help us sort items out of boxes. Magento screenshots so orders could be scanned and aggregated. Bins (oh so many bins) labeled with products, SKUs and order numbers to facilitate the matching exercise. If you’re going to ask people to help temporarily, the importance of seamless onboarding to facilitate immediate contributions is the lever to pull. We didn’t want the manager tethered to our makeshift conveyer belt so she could be answering the same questions over and over. She has plenty of other stuff demanding her attention.
Did we get it right immediately? No! But our mistakes occurred before anything went live. Before a single box was opened. Before anything had to be redone outside of the re-writing of some Post-It notes and re-ordering the flows on the wall. Taking the time to discuss the process before we implemented allowed us to avoid some serious misteps that would definitely have cost us time and resources. It’s all in the planning.