Schoolwear: On demand – step by step

Following on from last month’s article discussing strategies to adopt when operating in the market, industry consultant Will Hemming looks more in depth at the steps involved in fulfilling your sales orders on demand.

Breaking the process down into steps can help to identify what processes you need to set up, and where you might make investment to improve – either by increasing capacity, speed, or efficiency.

Step 1 – Pre sale

This covers everything from your marketing to your website and/or physical retail space. What information are you providing before the sale, and what expectations are you setting?

Can a customer find out everything they need to know and place an order without needing administrative interaction on your part?

If you are adding logos to products, are the logos set up with unique codes, and all information ready for production – with the logo code linked to the product information?

Step 2 – The sale

When a customer makes a transaction, whether it’s an order to be delivered later, or a retail purchase, what information is being collected?

Can you identify the customer for future marketing efforts, or to assess buying patterns?

If you are now going to make a product for delivery to the customer, have you captured all the information you need for production? Finally, are there opportunities to upsell?

Step 3 – Pre-production

During this stage, we have a chance to identify whether the order needs to be processed in a certain way (urgent or personalised) and you may also need to have logos approved, or purchase stock from a supplier.

This is one of the most crucial steps, and is also one where investment in systems can reap huge rewards in time and cost savings.

Step 4 – Production

If all of the information so far has been captured correctly, the order should be ready for the production phase at a predictable time (and location) with a clear expectation of when it will be finished.

When working on demand it’s likely that you will be using embroidery, or DTG/digital print – in all of these types of applications you can link your production machines to your system to get automated updates on output.

Step 5 – Packing/ dispatch

This should be one of the shortest phases – the quicker the order moves through here, the sooner it is in your customers’ hands.

How can you minimise the time spent from finishing the production work to being ready to leave the building? Does somebody have to manually type out dispatch labels? Do you provide tracking information to your customer so they can anticipate receiving their goods?

Is it worth paying 50p more to use a courier who offers timed delivery – increasing the chances of customer being able to accept the package – than a cheaper option where there are more non-deliveries?

Step 6 – Post dispatch

Although it’s tempting to consider everything finished at step 5, this final step allows us to not only monitor the performance of our operations (and potentially our suppliers such as couriers) but also to follow up with the customer, ask for feedback, and potentially offer the opportunity to repeat the order at some point in the future. Recording details of the sale in your accounts also needs to be done, whether it’s for invoicing, or just bookkeeping purposes. This is another task which can be automated.

While an order is moving through these steps, you also have the opportunity to send updates to your customer – which potentially reduces their need to call you to check up on their order, but also offers you more opportunity to expose them to your marketing.

One of the big buzzwords in software over the past few years has been CRM – which is essentially a systemisation of good practice – documenting contact with customers, scheduling follow ups, and creating an analysis of the relationships with your client base.  It’s worth remembering though, that this only helps you with steps 1/2/6, and potentially does nothing for 3/4/5. In a market where there are many people offering the same type of product, your ability to provide it more quickly (or more efficiently) could be a major selling point.

I strongly encourage you to look at how you can improve in the ‘middle steps’ of this process, as in my experience, these are the key in scaling your on demand offer into a significant operation.

Please email me if you want to know more about any of the ideas mentioned in this article: will@lwfcompany.com