More than half of today’s employees believe they can save at least two hours a day through Auto fulfillment. For small businesses, this means you can reallocate those valuable hours and resources to important business tasks. Rather than wasting them on tasks that can easily be automated.
Automation isn’t just about adding robotic arms to manufacturing equipment. There are many different ways that companies can save time simply by implementing processes that automatically handle repetitive tasks.
For many small businesses, ordering supplies and inventory or the processing is. And fulfilling orders is one of those menial tasks that can easily be automated. This is where autofill comes in.
Basically, this concept means just sending recurring orders on a set schedule or as needed. Rather than manually entering and fulfilling orders each time. Businesses can use this concept in several ways. Here are explanations of a few of them.
Autofill for e-commerce businesses
Fulfilling each order individually requires a lot of time and resources from e-commerce companies. In fact, on average, retailers pay 70 per cent of the order value for fulfilment tasks and resources. This includes everything from transporting inventory to the man hours spent processing each order. While you can’t necessarily cut all of these costs, you can streamline your operations to reduce wasted time and resources, which can ultimately improve your profit margins.
With auto-fulfilment, you can allow your customers to set up automatic orders on a specific timeline or as needed. With this information, your business is better equipped to plan, so you’ll have inventory ready and fulfilment processes in place to fill those orders on schedule.
Additionally, providing auto-fill options can improve your customers’ experience. They don’t need to spend so much time placing orders. And it also increases the likelihood of repeat purchases, which means more money in your company’s pocket.
This concept may not be applicable to every single e-commerce store. However, if you offer consumables or items that people are likely to order repeatedly, such as snacks, household items, and personal care products, providing an auto-fulfilment option for your shoppers could make your business more efficient while helping your customers.
Auto fulfillment for restocking
Poor inventory management costs businesses hundreds of billions of dollars each year. From excess product markups to miscalculating available products, it can be easy for businesses to make mistakes when manually ordering inventory. And even if you don’t make any real mistakes, you can waste a lot of time figuring out what to order and going through the process manually each time.
Autofill takes a lot of the guesswork out of this process, and thus errors. You can automatically order new products based on real-time data from your POS system. Or you can set up repeat purchases based on sales analysis from previous years. This allows you to cut out the inventory ordering process and make ordering decisions much easier because it is always based on actual sales data.
Auto fulfillment for purchasing inventory
Even if you work in an office or service business where you don’t handle physical products, automated fulfilment can still support your operations. Think of all the office supplies or tools you use on a regular basis. If you need to spend time ordering things every time you run out of a commonly used item, that’s time away from other important business tasks.
In offices, this concept can be beneficial when it comes to consumables that you use evenly throughout the year, including paper, pens, and printer ink. You can either set up a specific plan with your provider or even use an IoT device to handle this part of the process automatically.
This concept can also apply to service businesses that use certain supplies or tools on an ongoing basis. For example, a dental or medical facility could set up automatic refills for things like latex gloves, gauze, and syringes. Also, many more blogs are there on investments here. Source SBA.
