10 Steps to Successful Online Grocery: Chapter 4. Fine-tune your picking and delivery

Welcome to Chapter 4 of our 10-step guide: What to consider when starting your on-demand grocery service. In this chapter we will go through some important factors to help you fine-tune your picking and delivery process.

Picking and delivery create most of the costs in online grocery and have the biggest impact on profitability of your on-demand service. Optimising your fulfilment process beforehand and creating a proper fulfilment process strategy can therefore significantly reduce your operating costs and increase productivity.

Engaging the opportunity of grocery eCommerce with the right solution means

  • Added convenience to your customers and your associates
  • Operational precision and productivity
  • Enabling your team to provide excellent customer experiences

This all sounds great, but what about the costs? How to insure your costs don’t grow with the addition on-demand services, but instead they improve your operational efficiency? The secret to this labor improvement is choosing the right technology – one that has been tested, validated, and effective in improving labor results in all size stores, in all different retail food store formats, regardless of time of day and day of week, and already in place in over 1300 retail food store locations worldwide – that is our technology. Naveo Commerce Fulfilment has been developed based on the needs and requirements of retailers across the world. This has resulted to a technology that in many stores has enabled up to 50% shorter picking times compared to manual picking, and a picking efficiency of up to 150 items/hour (normal average 100-130 items/hour). Integrated and fully transparent, Naveo Commerce fulfilment now covers everything from order-picking optimisation to route planning for home deliveries.

 

Following are the biggest advantages of deploying our fulfilment technology to your store.

1. Optimized picking routes. All orders are batched automatically for the most optimized picking routes, or the store manager can group the orders by collection/delivery time slots. The retailer can optimize picking sequence according to aisle order or to utilize the exact product locations. As product locations differ from store to store, the picking sequence can be modified per store.

2. Parallel picking. The solution enables you to manage parallel picking of orders so that one picker can pick up to eight orders at the same time while walking through the store along an optimized picking path. In multiple order picking, individual orders are visualized with colors, making it very intuitive for the picker to see which products belong to which order.  The system also makes sure that each order is picked by one picker at a time.

3. Minimizing errors. With barcode scanning, the system verifies that the picker places the product in the correct bin, and notifies the picker if the picked product does not match the ordered article. In case one of the items in the order is missing from the shelf, the system proposes another product based on previous substitution rules (agreed to by the retailer in advance). Read more about substituting products in our next chapter.

4. Organized storage. Once the order is placed into storage, the order handler can easily save the storage location by scanning the barcode of the location selected.

5. Information flow. All information is processed in real-time to allow your team to view and manage orders effectively. Customers can modify their order and delivery time until the picking starts. They are kept up-to-date by sms and/or email notifications from the moment their order goes to picking till the time the driver arrives, or they go to collect their order in-store.

We believe the right fulfilment solution should be centralised, integrated and fully transparent – this translates into optimal fulfilment efficiency and customer experiences. Find out more about our solution here.

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