Lamps Plus shortens fulfillment cycle to 2 days from 14

With its business growing in online and in-store kiosk orders, Lamps Plus had difficulty last holiday season in keeping up with order fulfillment. But a new web-based fulfillment system has cut its fulfillment time to 48 hours from as long as 14 days, Bill Gratke, director of planning and supply chain management, tells InternetRetailer.com. “We’re shipping a heck of a lot more and shipping more quickly,” he says.

Lamps Plus is using Escalate Fulfillment, a hosted web application from Escalate Inc., to streamline the way it processes orders and prepares them for shipping. In the past, Gratke says, Lamps Plus’s fulfillment software was designed to split the processing of orders into different segments for different parts of lamps, so that its pick-and-pack workers would receive an order for the base of a lamp at a time different from when they received an order for the bulb fixture. That not only resulted in a longer time to complete orders for shipment, but it also resulted in using multiple packages to ship a single product.

The new system is designed to send a single order to the pick-and-pack department in the warehouse, enabling workers to consolidate orders into fewer packages and process them faster for shipment, Gratke says. Lamps Plus has reduced its number of shipped packages by 30% and reduced shipping costs, he says.

The Escalate system also generates packing lists and shipping labels and sends records of daily shipments to UPS, Lamps Plus’s primary carrier. In addition, it automatically e-mails shipping notices to customers with information on how to track their shipments.

Lamps Plus figures the new system will be able to handle an expected surge in the number of online and kiosk orders during the 2004 Christmas shopping season. “We expect to be fulfilling an average of 1,000 orders a day by the end of this year, double our shipments from a year earlier,” Gratke says.