A prominent mail order business specializing in gift basket and college care package delivery found itself in a predicament: As catalog sales began to take off, processing the growing volume of physical mail orders became too difficult for the modest inhouse fulfillment team.
“The process was cumbersome, expensive and time-consuming,” said the company’s Senior Operations Manager. “We’re dealing with paper order forms in the hundreds of thousands, so you can imagine how much staff and handling that takes. We realized, ‘Our business is growing above and beyond our projections so we need to increase our capacity and increase it quickly.”
Processing, scanning and verifying the physical orders became a full-time operational concern. Not only was the process unsustainable from an operational perspective, the nature of these orders made errors common. The company felt that, unless it could offload some of this processing, the business would not be able to scale and maximize revenue.