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The 21st century fulfillment service provider is a highly-advanced, precision engineered enterprise that’s much like a precision watch with many systems moving simultaneously to maximize productivity while striving to eliminate accident, inventory loss, and time forfeiture.
Modern fulfillment houses are administrated by efficiency and logistics management experts who have years of experience trying to find new and better ways to make sure logistics and order completion come off without a hitch whenever possible.
By outsourcing to a fulfillment service provider, a small business gains the advantages of having highly experienced logistics management professionals on staff without having to pay the high salaries and benefits that experienced professionals demand. The small business can at the same time reduce and even partially eliminate many of its own operating costs.
Fulfillment Warehousing
The popular image of the warehouse is less than flattering. In fact, it’s downright dreary. Images of dark rooms, musty atmospheres, and dust-filled shelves are probably the most popular image of the traditional warehouse, but it’s a long way from the realities of the modern fulfillment service’s storage space. Today fulfillment companies maintain clean, brightly lit, and climate controlled facilities that can house any type of product from clothing to food to furniture and more.
The warehouse operated by a fulfillment center is often adjacent to or nearby the processing center, which helps to streamline the entire fulfillment process and eliminate heavy transportation costs. Here, the processing of countless numbers of products takes place at multiple workstations. The fulfillment center’s staff is carefully screened and only the best candidates based on prior work experience and attention to detail. Employees then receive extensive and continual training.
The Shipment and Delivery
Once the package is prepared for shipment, it’s given a tracking number that’s subsequently supplied to both the business and the customer, so that both can monitor its rate of progress through the shipping provider’s systems. The package is not with the service provider’s address information, but rather the logo and business address of the client business.
This makes the service provider company essentially an “invisible hand” in the client business’ operations, smoothing out their fulfillment while essentially remaining unseen in the day to day business transactions. For small businesses and startups looking to make an important debut or an impressive splash with the public, such reduced visibility will likely assist in their image-building goals.
