Booking parcels and pallets without the phone calls

For many wholesalers, the last mile of the order process is the most manual. The warehouse passes on weights and dimensions, someone in the office logs in to the carrier’s portal, books the delivery, prints a label and copies the tracking number back into the ERP.

Carriers have APIs for all of this. The work is in connecting them to your process properly.

Parcels and pallets work differently

Most UK businesses that ship physical goods use two kinds of carrier:

• Parcel carriers such as DPD, Royal Mail and Parcelforce, where a parcel can usually be priced and booked instantly through an API.
• Pallet networks such as TPN, where bookings are made through the network’s integration and are often only accepted a few days before the delivery date. TPN’s booking window, for example, is seven days.

A good system handles both. The delivery method chosen when the order was approved decides how it’s packed (parcels or pallets) and which carrier it’s booked with.

Pricing: check before you invoice

When the warehouse completes an order, the platform knows the real weights and dimensions. It can price the delivery live with the parcel carrier, or from your pallet network’s rate card or API, and update the delivery charge on the order in your ERP.

Sometimes the real cost differs from the delivery charge on the customer’s PO. We treat that as a decision for the office, not something to resolve automatically. The order is held, the difference is shown, and someone checks it and confirms, with the chance to amend the order before it’s invoiced.

Booking

Parcels are booked straight away. Pallets due within the booking window are booked straight away too. Pallets due later are queued and booked automatically once they fall inside the window, and the right service, such as next day or a dedicated day with a tail lift, can be chosen from the delivery date.

The office gets one screen listing every shipment, queued, booked or failed, with the carrier, booking date, tracking number and charge.

Labels and ship notes

Automatic printing removes one of the most tedious jobs on the packing bench. A small, pre-configured PC connects your existing printers to a cloud printing service such as PrintNode:

• Ship notes print on the A4 printer as soon as an order is completed on the device, so the paperwork is with the parcel or pallet straight away.
• Carrier labels print on a 4x6 inch label printer as soon as the booking is made. For queued pallet bookings, that’s on the day of booking, and the ship note lets staff match the label to the right pallet.

The only real requirement is a label printer that takes standard 4x6 inch labels.

When bookings fail

Bookings occasionally fail, most often because of an invalid postcode or address. When that happens, the shipment is marked as failed with the carrier’s reason, the office can correct the problem, and the booking can be retried from the same screen. Validating addresses when the order is first reviewed avoids most of these failures in the first place.

Closing the loop

Once a shipment is booked, the tracking number, number of packages and total weight are saved against the order in your ERP, and the order is completed. Your ERP then raises the invoice as it always has.

Collections follow the same pick and pack process but skip the carrier. The customer is emailed when their order is ready, and the name of whoever collects it is recorded on the order.

If you’re booking deliveries by hand today and want to see how much of it could run on its own, book a discovery call.