If you have been running Pacejet for awhile, you may be most familiar with the basic use-case for freight quoting or shipping that operates on one order or shipment at a time. It’s easy, straightforward, grab the order, pack it, rate-shop if you want, ship it, and move on to the next order. As you start moving towards high-volume shipping, it may no longer be sufficient to handle orders one at a time and you’ll start looking for tools that can speed things up, handle activities in groups, separate picking from packing, engage wedge scanners, or even pack together and ship multiple orders. That’s where you’ll want to look at processing workflows involving the Pacejet Shipping Workbench.
Read on for more detail and a video demo of the Shipping Workbench …
Shipping Workbench as a “Manifesting” Station
Think of the shipping workbench as a home base for shippers to rapidly identify picked orders, pack them up, and process them with carriers using a variety of workflows. Some organizations think of these types of stations as “manifesting” stations, although that tends to be associated more with “parcel manifesting” rather than full multi-carrier, high-volume shipping solutions like Pacejet. In a typical high-volume shipping setup, the shipping workbench is used with more than one shipping stations, each configured with appropriate printers, electronics scales, and perhaps wedge scanners, and then used to pack items into containers, weigh containers, record container dimensions/ weight, transact with carriers, print labels and paperwork, and then move containers down towards the dock staging areas.
Staging of Shipments as Ready to Pack and Ship
An initial key feature of the Shipping Workbench is that it provides a “staging area” for shipments that area ready to be packed and shipped and can receive those shipments from a variety of upstream workflows or applications. Common examples include:
- Orders picked or packed in the ERP flow automatically to the workbench
- Orders that are picked via RF scanning application are staged as completed
- Orders marked as picked via batch are staged as batches are ready
- Orders transmitted via Pacejet File Connect are staged immediately
Optimized Workflows for Pack and Ship
A key characteristics of the Shipping Workbench is that it provides a flexible set of workflows that can be selected based on specific types of processing and the needs of your business. Some of the key workflows include:
- Scan in a pick list, rate-shop for lowest cost carrier, process the shipment
- Scan in a pick list, drag and drop items into containers, rate-shop and ship
- Scan in a pick list, scan-verify items into containers, rate-shop and ship
- Identify a batch of shipments and auto ship the set at one time
- Identify a set of shipments, consolidate into a container, rate-shop and ship
- Identify a shipment, enter containers and weights, rate-shop and ship
Video of the Shipping Workbench with NetSuite
This video of NetSuite shipment processing with the shipping workbench brings some of the key concepts together into a visible process flow. Several examples are shown here including individually fulfilling items and having them automatically staged. The demo also uses instant shipping to process shipments in batches. Finally, a NetSuite batch fulfillment example shows how large groups of orders could be marked as fulfilled, staged and then processed on the shipping workbench, making it an incredibly useful high-volume shipping solution for growing businesses.
Interested in Learning More?
Have more questions, want to get going on your upgrade to the latest Pacejet version, interested in this new feature? Call Pacejet at 877-722-3538, email info@pacejet.com, or visit Pacejet.com.
