The Party Planning approach to product sales is a great way to combine gathering with friends in a social setting with moving exciting products. It comes with challenges, but with proper planning and use of our transportation management software, it’s quite effective.
- At Amware, Party Planning fulfillment involves taking the entire order of a party with guest orders embedded.
- We begin by handling an entire party as one order, then splitting the guest orders out so each participant’s items are generated on a specific pack slip and placed in a master carton going to the party host’s home.
- Backordered items are listed on the pack slip by individual item, if there are any. The pack slip and master order are then sent to the host.
- The process helps customers keep track of individual orders and helps the fulfillment company tie back to the original inventory.
This method gives you one order that has line items to identify who that item is for and the quantity of each item. While one order defines the whole party, the fulfillment company’s system needs to break it out by individual.
This improves accuracy levels and reduces costs, which in turn means less work for you, the host. (Normally the host would have to package the orders individually after receiving the master order from the fulfillment company.)
We also determine the method of shipment for every Party Planning order.
For example, we have a client who offers four options for shipping: next day, two day, 5-7 days or 7-14 days. We decide which one of these options should be used based on the warehouse state assignment that has been preapproved with our clients. The system goes through a series of lookups to see which warehouse should receive the assignment. Depending on the carrier, and if it can be shipped ground, we then use this option as long as it can make it to the customer on time. This optimizes freight costs and freight management, while getting the product to the customer on time.
We calculate the weight of every order based on the weight of the items, and then determine the least costly method to ship to our customer. The goal is to minimize cost and maximize customer service.
All of this is automated using our transportation management software. This allows our warehouse associates to focus solely on getting the right products into each order – quickly and accurately.
