Common Warehouse Mistakes and Remedies to Overcome It

Businesses generate sales by delivering a quality product and the best customer service. But for the customers, the only thing that matters is timely and damage-free delivery. There is a possibility of warehouse shipping mistakes for the sales online and over far distances. The product handling for busy warehouses is a bit difficult, triggering warehouse shipping and logistics mistakes.

But there is nothing to worry about as the warehouse shipping issues can be identified and rectified at ease with the proper knowledge of business execution. If you are new to the business and encountering lots of shipping mistakes, this article will help educate you on the long-term repercussions of these mistakes. Follow on till the end!

The Common Warehouse Shipping Mistakes

How many times have you heard complaints about products being mis-shipped? You might have seen a lot of reviews lately that might have the same complaint! But this is not the only shipping mistake that the warehouse owners make. Many more mistakes could have been easily avoided but ended up generating overhead expenses for the warehouse business. The concerned shipping mistakes are:

1. Cost-Oriented Mistakes

Even though you are running the most efficient shipping and receiving system, there is a possibility that you still might make some mistakes. Transportation costs are never the same, and it is a mistake to assume that the cost of transportation today is the same as that of yesterday. Therefore, the warehouse shippers pay extra charges for shipping the products early. For instance, faster shipments through the air are expensive than ground shipment for nearby places.

Therefore, if the distance is short for delivery, you should choose your mode of transportation and cost it wisely. It will help you save a lot of money on unnecessary transits through the air, where ground-level transit would have been proficient.

2. Inventory Mistakes

If the products run out of stock, are lost, or are damaged, it is a sign of a disorganized inventory. Apart from that, a significant warehouse shipping mistake concerning the unorganized list is shipping the wrong order. All of the warehouses should have respective areas or spaces for the inventories. It is the job of professionals to maintain them accurately.

The warehouse operators should take excellent care while order picking and match it with the order details. The accuracy is what will help minimize these mistakes. If these silly shipping mistakes continue frequently, then your warehouse will soon stop receiving the orders. Moreover, quality checks are also essential for the most efficient shipping and receiving system.

Warehouse picking optimization is essential to avoid inventory and order processing mistakes. You might scan the products on your management software and tally the order specifications with the product. If it matches, you can process the order; if not, you might have to change it to the one the customer has ordered. For instance, if a customer has ordered a shirt for size XL but has picked the order from the warehouse for a size L, you cannot pass the order. This is what you need to check to avoid inventory mistakes.

3. Data Entry Mistakes

Data entry mistakes are a common problem within warehouse management operations. Humans sitting behind the computer for feeding data might cause the possibility of mistakes. Suppose, if the person enters wrong data information upon the WMS, then the shipment receipt for a product won’t match with any of the numbers within your list.

As a result, if the product is returned to the warehouse for any damage or defect, it won’t show in the WMS portal. Hence, warehouse delays will arise! Therefore, the data entry aspects are automated, and there is less human error in the mass warehouse order management process. These data entry mistakes can be very crucial in distorting the entire track record of the warehouse shipping and receiving entries. Moreover, not all humans might lack consistency in entering the data, but the automated approach is more reliable.

4. Incorrect Packaging 

There are many cases where the packaging aspect is unsuitable for warehouse businesses. It is one of the most common mistakes that the customers often complain about! Faulty or inappropriate packaging can probably result in product damage. Some of the instances of poor packaging include incorrect sized packaging, improper weight-oriented packaging, lack of safe-transit protection within the packaging, and others.

For instance, if someone has ordered a glass vase from an e-commerce store, then it is the responsibility of the packaging team to add air packing essentials to the box. Such packing will ensure that the glass vase doesn’t move much during the transit and stay safe from breakage. Without such air packaging, the glass vase has a high chance of experiencing damage when it reaches the customer. Therefore, the warehouse operations need to look into this shipping mistake. It is because this is a massive blunder than getting the products mis-shipped.

5. Delivery at Wrong Address

It is one of the most common mistakes of shipping that results in delivering the product to the wrong address. There might be several reasons, such as incorrect label printing or manual displacement of the order details. But irrespective of the causes, the end consumer gets unhappy. And the warehouse management team then has to locate the item, recover it, and send it back to the original address. It creates a massive warehouse delay!

This mistake can be avoided by cross-checking the order details and tallying them at every shipping stage. It will help the operators to eliminate the possibility of these mistakes.

Conclusion

There are many mistakes that warehouse management teams make, but with the proper strategies in place you can eliminate them all. You should have responsive plans ready to go so that any mistake is quickly resolved without too much loss of inventory.

Our software for 3PLs will help you manage your warehouse needs and optimize your picking process through a variety of features including real-time order status updates, accurate location information on each item as well as barcode scanning capabilities which drastically reduce errors and time wasted by employees trying to find items. We invite you to contact us today if you’d like more details about how our system can tailor itself to fit into any size or type of distribution center.