Key Benefits and Outcomes
Doubled warehouse throughput
Saved 3-4 hours of daily order prep
Reduced shipping and labor costs
ShipJunction greatly reduced the time it takes to process orders and prepare them for picking in the warehouse. Thus, increasing the amount of time warehouse personnel have to ship orders and allowing for more orders to be fulfilled in a single day.
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The Solution
ShipJunction worked with the winery’s operations team to identify the current constraints in its workflow. The planning approach was unique in that the discussions were not bound by any legacy system limitation. It started with one question: If we had the opportunity to reimagine how we do our fulfillment, how would we do it?
The answer was a new workflow that removed manual clicks and decisions at each stage while keeping the process the team already knew.
For each order, ShipJunction generates one integrated label that combines the invoice, the gift message, and the carrier shipping label, all printed from a single printer.
Wave Planning enables the warehouse team to set up recurring waves that batch and sequence orders by warehouse location, SKU, and box size, so every batch follows the pick path.
To simplify carrier management and compliance, ShipJunction integrates with each of the winery’s carrier accounts and its alcohol compliance system. The Shipping Rules Engine automatically routes every order to the lowest-cost service that meets its delivery date, pulls the required compliance information, and generates the shipping labels and documents.
Those rules replace the decisions that used to live in individual team members’ heads. ShipJunction automates the clicking between the order management system, the compliance system, and the carrier portals while keeping change management to a minimum.
The Result
Printing and sorting invoices, gift messages, and labels, which once consumed 3-4 hours each morning, now takes 10 minutes. The staff member who handled that work and the rest of the team now have more time in the day to focus on getting packages shipped. Warehouse throughput doubled from 600 to 1,200 orders per day.
Shipping costs decreased too, because shipping rules are automated and the ideal service is automatically selected that will deliver each shipment on time.
Beyond efficiency gains, the warehouse solved the tribal knowledge issue. ShipJunction now handles the decisions the team used to make manually on the fly, so training is much faster, and anyone on the team can quickly learn to pick, pack, and ship orders. The warehouse doesn’t have to slow down when someone misses a day of work.
Even as throughput doubled, errors and mis-shipments dropped. With orders going out right the first time, their customers’ experience improved. The warehouse now focuses its time and energy on getting new orders out on time instead of fixing errors. Accurate compliance information on every shipment also reduces the winery’s regulatory risk.
“ShipJunction helped us to increase our shipping volume, reduce carrier and labor costs, and created new workflow efficiencies that have allowed our company to easily keep up double digit growth.” – Vice President of Operations
A fast-growing wine producer with several labels and a direct-to-consumer sales model. It sells its wines and curated gift sets through its own online store and other sales channels, running a high-volume, multi-channel operation with strong holiday demand.
Industry: Wine Retail
Headquarters: Northern California