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The Modern Convenience of Order Tracking
Tracking your orders is very modern. Live updates on your phone let you follow a personal grocery shopper as they pick up items or suggest replacements at the store in real-time on an app that didn’t exist a few years ago.
Challenges with Tracking Purchase Orders
Yet tracking your Purchase Orders can feel ancient. Your freight carrier will have a tracking number, but there’s no guarantee that this updates between picking up at your warehouse and dropping off to your customer. Worse, once a shipment is delivered it can enter a limbo period where you have no visibility on whether your products have begun selling yet. This is without getting into what happens when items delivered months ago seemingly vanish.
Strategies for Improved Shipment Tracking
There’s no magic solution for this. Some vendors and clients are always going to put the pressure back on you to keep track of where your products physically are. That said, there are a few tips to save yourself some stress when trying to track the full life of your shipments.
Choosing the Right Shipping Method
From the start, it’s best to choose how you ship carefully. Parcel shipments going through major names like FedEx and UPS generally offer updates each step of the way for where your package is physically located. Counterintuitively, it’s the larger shipments where you lose the ability to track. Any time your shipment needs to be loaded onto a pallet or is more than 150 pounds you run the risk of reduced visibility with some companies being worse at tracking than others.
Consulting with Freight Brokers and Operations Managers
If you have a pallet-sized shipment that must be delivered by a certain date or have up-to-date tracking, we’d suggest asking your freight broker or operations manager for an opinion on who to ship with. Chances are your team already has notes on which provider manages things best. Be aware that Full Truckload shipments, usually defined as eight or more pallets on one bill of lading, generally don’t offer real-time tracking and won’t update until the truck is physically at the destination.
Understanding Client Tracking Systems
Once your shipper has confirmed delivery, an understanding of how your client tracks items will help you track your products. Shipments delivered to a Distribution Center may be slow to enter your client’s system, meaning that the individual items on an order may not be marked as received for a few days after the actual delivery. This is normal, especially for end-of-week deliveries, and you shouldn’t worry so long as these are noted as received within a few business days.
Monitoring Inventory After Delivery
Additionally, pallets that are broken down at a warehouse can take some time before their components show up in store inventory. This commonly means that items previously reported as received or in a warehouse inventory can seemingly vanish from Sales and Stock reporting. You should check with your buyer if you have concerns about items not yet showing up at stores, typically if an item was received more than a week ago without a store noting it as on hand.
Navigating Retailer-Specific Reporting
Once items have finally made it to stores, keep in mind how each of your accounts track inventory. Retailer-specific reporting can make it difficult to understand what Sales and Stock reports are truly communicating. For example, some accounts will remove seasonal items from reports once they’re put on markdown even if products are physically still on shelves. Other times, a store transfer may put items back into that shipping limbo period where an item exits reporting while in transit. This is further complicated by the possibility that items have legitimately exited inventory without having been sold through shrinkage or returns.
Regular Sales and Inventory Tracking
Tracking your sales and inventory regularly, ideally on a weekly basis, is essential at this stage. Whether using Excel or a tool like SKYPAD, tracking your sales helps ensure that all items have been sold or removed from reporting for a valid reason. If you’re a SKYPAD user, integrating Shipments into your SKYPAD app will provide a comprehensive view of distribution, allowing you to track shipments alongside weekly sales and inventory metrics. Understanding these factors will enable you to track the location and status of your products more accurately.