The lockdown challenge - How to manage an increase in volume of sales orders but with small product quantities per order

Driven by the change in shopping habits during lockdown, and a need to keep businesses commercially viable, many companies have had to rapidly change their business processes to switch to eCommerce trading, and dispatch direct from their warehouse.

Typically, we have seen the focus move from wholesale, bulk, B2B orders to B2C as people have not been able to shop in-store, so have shifted their spending capability to online shopping, which has led to challenges within our customer base, as they have reacted this shift to meet a different way of fulfilling demand for their product.

According to the UK Office of National Statistics bulletin, Online retail sales in July were 50.4% higher than February’s pre-pandemic levels* and typically within the sector as a proportion of all retailing, online sales now make up 28.9% of all sales.

With businesses returning to a new normal and people able to return to the high street to shop, this increase in online shopping will reduce but when people are polled, the overwhelming feedback is that having increased shopping via the web many will continue to do so, all be it at a slightly lower level than they did during lockdown.

How Datalinx have assisted our Sage 200 customers...

Datalinx has existing functionality within the Warehouse Manager 200 that assists our customers with this requirement and change of sales order picking focus. This technique allows a number of orders to be picked in one “walk” around the warehouse and is particularly useful when there are a lot of small quantity / volume / weight orders to be picked.

Using tote’ bins line items for the same sales order are picked into the same ‘tote’ bin to ensure all of the items for a particular order are kept together. 

Warehouse Manager for Sage 200

 WHM200 provides a number of different ways in which the sales orders to include in a wave pick may be selected:

• Automatic selection of orders by the system as tote bins are nominated/assigned
• On a barcode scanner, selecting individual orders to be picked
• Selecting orders by Order Priority (assigned within Sage200)
• Selecting orders by Customer Account Code (irrespective of the delivery address)

*https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/retailindustry/bulletins/retailsales/july2020