Time to Fulfillment is the total amount of time it takes for any order to be fulfilled or shipped out. Your orders are deemed fulfilled when you give the shipment to a shipping carrier service.
There are many benefits of having a faster fulfillment time. A shorter fulfillment time ensures higher customer satisfaction. If your customers receive their orders faster, then they would be willing to trust your business and return to your store.
You can also lower your shipping costs with a decrease in your processing time. If your processing time is fast, then you could have more options to choose from for shipping. You could always go with cheaper and slower shipping and yet have your shipments delivered on time. Therefore, it’s essential to keep track of this metric.
Time to Fulfillment varies widely across the world and public benchmarks are not available.
To improve your time to fulfillment you can group your products if they undergo the same processing steps. This will ensure that you do not repeat the steps. For example, an electronics store can group the fulfillment of smaller items (e.g., mobile phones) together into one fulfillment flow at the warehouse. Bigger items (e.g., refridgerators) can have a separate flow (or even a different exit bay at the warehouse) to ensure the fulfillment does not negatively impact that of other items.
Prepare a detailed list of processing steps, including the estimated length of time for each group of products. Having a list will help you understand your processing steps so that you can come up with better strategies to make the process more efficient. For instance, if you have a list, it would be easier to highlight the steps that can be prepared in advance, remove unnecessary steps or even find common efforts among different groups.
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