Successful marketing or social media campaigns mean marketing and sales teams are hitting—and maybe even surpassung—their goals. This is great, but it also means the warehouses are going to be under increased pressure to get more orders out quickly and accurately.
Leaders who aren’t certain that their warehouse systems and workers can handle sudden increased order volume effectively might be feeling a lot of stress. Worries surrounding major capital upgrades, system failures, and worker shortages can crop up quickly. These are legitimate concerns…but how swiftly they can be quelled may just boil down to what kind of systems you have in place.
Can Your Fulfillment System Handle the Pressure of Sudden High Volume?
Whether or not your fulfillment system can handle sudden spikes in order volume is often the first question that comes to mind when a marketing or social media campaign takes off—or your product “goes viral.” For manual warehouses, this makes sense. There are often too many uncertainties surrounding worker capacity and availability, making actual throughput capacity nearly impossible to estimate until things get going. Then, if the system can’t keep up, errors and chargebacks pile up, customers don’t receive orders on time, and revenue is lost.
But automated warehouses have a major advantage, which is that machines have known parameters that are easily accessible in their Functional Specification Document (FSD). This document outlines in precise detail how the system will operate, including its boundaries and how many orders it can manage per hour. This allows operators to estimate in advance how many orders it is capable of fulfilling, regardless of what its current output is.
And so, the first question that should come to mind for leaders and managers of automated warehouses now becomes “Are we feeding and organizing the work correctly to get the most out of our machines?”
Automation Takes the Guesswork Out of Scaling
Automation allows for increased control when scaling. And the more processes become automated, the more control you have. This level of control is largely due to inherent measurability in the system (as opposed to uncertainty). Instead of guessing and hoping for the best, each machine operates on a kind of output scale that is engineered into the system, in which parameters can be altered when volumes change, allowing for more accurate business planning.
Automated systems are typically designed with plenty of headroom. For example, a system may be operating at a throughput of 4,000 packages a day, but capable of 8,000 packages a day with a few changes (like starting earlier or grouping orders by carrier for increased efficiency).
When maximum capacity is measurable, it is far easier to determine whether (and how many) additional systems are needed when orders spike. If each picking system, for example, is capable of 8,000 packages a day and your orders are topping out at 7,000, no upgrades are necessary. If your campaign has really taken off, and you need to hit 10,000 a day, you can arrange for an upgrade, while knowing for certain that you actually need it. Another benefit of automation is that scaling by adding machines is typically far easier, faster, and more efficient than scrambling to hire workers that may or may not stick around.
Concrete Strategies for Handling Volume Spikes
While some automated systems have adjustable speed settings for tasks like picking, sorting, and packing, high volumes are also managed by strategic feeding and organization. This is particularly useful for sudden or temporary spikes (where pricey upgrades may not be worth the investment long term).
Take, for example, a lipstick product that has gone viral after an influencer mentions it on a popular YouTube channel. Orders spike, and the operation must spend a week shipping that particular product as efficiently as possible.
A warehouse can handle the temporary increase in order volume with the following tactics:
- Time Management: Starting the fulfillment process earlier in the day, such as beginning operations before the usual shift starts, can allow the workload to be spread out more evenly across the day, reducing the risk of bottlenecks later in the shift. This does not necessarily require hiring more people or forcing overtime on workers in automated warehouses. One or a few people can come in early to start up picking robots or parcel sortation machines and then leave early when other workers are available. Systems can also run longer (after normal work hours) if a few workers have staggered hours on those days. This strategy allows more orders to be completed with few to no additional hours billed.
- Rethinking Fulfillment Sequence: The sequence of orders is malleable. Data from the warehouse control system (WCS) can help managers prioritize which orders should be picked and processed first based on urgency (e.g., same-day delivery vs. standard shipping). Or in cases like the lipstick spike example, high-value items can be given a higher priority for picking to maintain customer satisfaction. Orders can also be clustered together based on their geographic location, product type, or similar shipping requirements. Orders that share a common route or destination can be fulfilled in parallel to reduce total cycle time.
- Grouping Orders by Carrier: Because different carriers have different shipping requirements, like packaging guidelines and documentation standards, grouping orders by carrier can reduce sorting time after packing and reduce errors due to varying requirements. This also helps to streamline handoffs at the end of the day.
- Forward Staging: When a particular product, like the lipstick in the example, accounts for a large portion of the day’s orders, it doesn’t make sense to keep it on some back shelf so that workers or picking machines must waste time bringing individual products across the warehouse. Instead, forward staging can streamline picking and packing of these popular products by creating a temporary high movers rack closer to fulfillment. When orders for the products start going back down, the product be moved back to its original location. This also helps to decrease congestion in aisles. According to a study from the Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research, order picking accounts for around 55% of warehouse operating costs, so reducing picking time for top-selling products can make a big impact on cost savings.
Take the Stress out of Success
In an automated warehouse, stress doesn’t need to be the initial response to a successful marketing campaign. Instead of worrying about whether fulfillment can keep up with demand, leaders can focus on what combination of built-in capacity, smarter sequencing, and temporary process adjustments are needed to get the job done. This does require a little bit of thinking, but you can always rest assured that your fulfillment system can keep up with demand, whether it is temporary or long-term. You can also rest assured that more intense and long-term scaling only requires the addition of a few modular components.
A 3PL company called DCL Logistics is a model example of how Streamtech’s automation can help a company swiftly adjust to sudden order volumes. DCL came to Streamtech with a need to adapt to quickly changing order volume during promotions, product launches, and sudden peaks in demand. Streamtech’s WSC systems and sortation automation filled that need by helping them scale up or down, with only a moment’s notice.
If your company is experiencing sudden high volumes due to great marketing or unexpected social media mentions, but you’re uncertain whether your warehouse is capable of effectively keeping up with demand, Streamtech can help. Set up a project assessment today.
