Optimizing Order Fulfillment for a Premium Outdoor Furniture Retailer

A premium outdoor furniture and accessories retailer was looking for help to streamline the shipping aspect of their order fulfillment process. Hundreds of orders are received daily via various retail outlets. Each retail outlet has its own unique process for fulfilling orders.

Each process involved manual and labor-intensive tasks to create the shipping labels, initiate the packaging process and execute package pick-up by a shipping service. After many years of the same process, the premium outdoor furniture the retailer decided to automate with ARDEM to reduce costs and allow in-house staff to focus on more value-add responsibilities.

The current process to complete required fulfillment tasks depended on multiple people from multiple departments. The entire process was manual and relied on handwritten information on physical forms. The initial label creation would often occur hours before the warehouse was even notified of the order. The gap of time between one step and the next would often result in a backlog of orders by the end of the day. Since all orders were required to be shipped the same day the order was placed, the backlog was problematic.

ARDEM’s solution added efficiencies at every level of the order fulfillment process. The work of multiple in-house staff within multiple departments was consolidated into one full-time analyst. Not only has this outdoor furniture retailer benefited from immediate cost savings from utilizing less in-house staff to complete these tasks but also continues to benefit from a shorter payment cycle time now that invoice details are entered into NetSuite quicker. ARDEM is now onto streamlining the shipment fulfillment process for the other retail outlets with the goal of yielding, even more, cost savings in the years to come.