Handling Twice the Orders With the Same Staff

Volume breaks one thing first

At double the orders, most of the work simply takes twice as long, which is manageable.

One step does not scale that way, and it becomes the constraint that everything else queues behind.

Which step it is differs by business: picking in a crowded stockroom, printing labels one at a time, answering messages, or one person who is the only one who knows something.

Identifying it in advance is worth more than any general effort to be more efficient, because effort spent anywhere else changes nothing.

Find it before December

The diagnosis, which takes an afternoon.

Walk an order through from arriving to leaving and time each step honestly, including the waiting.

Then ask which step would be worst at three times the volume, which is usually obvious once the steps are written down.

Look for anything involving one person, one machine, or one physical space, since those are where queues form.

Ask whoever does the work, who almost always knows and has never been asked.

Last year's experience is the other source: whatever everybody complained about in December is the bottleneck.

Do the work before the volume

• Pre-assemble the common packages.
• Pre-fold boxes and cut packing material.
• Print the inserts and thank-you cards.
• Move fast-moving stock within reach.
• Buy the consumables now, at leisure.

The fourth is the cheapest change with the largest effect. Rearranging a stockroom so the twenty best-selling items are closest removes a large share of the walking, which is frequently most of the picking time.

Batch instead of processing one at a time

The single biggest process change available.

Processing an order end to end, then starting the next, means switching tasks constantly and touching each tool repeatedly.

Batching means printing twenty labels at once, picking twenty orders in one pass through the stockroom, then packing twenty.

That removes the switching, and it lets one pass through the shelves collect items for many orders rather than walking the same route twenty times.

It also means two people can work in parallel on different stages rather than getting in each other's way.

Batch by dispatch time rather than continuously: two or three batches a day is usually right, and processing each order as it lands is what feels responsive and costs the most.

A worked example

A shop handling around thirty orders a day expected sixty in December, with the same two people.

Timing the steps showed picking took about four minutes an order, mostly walking, and packing about three.

They moved the twenty best sellers to shelving beside the packing bench, pre-folded three hundred boxes over two evenings, and switched to picking in batches of fifteen twice a day.

Picking fell to under two minutes an order and the walking largely disappeared.

They handled the December volume with the same two people and one extra afternoon a week.

Nothing they did required buying anything except boxes they would have bought anyway.

Messages are the hidden load

And they scale worse than the orders do.

Double the orders produces more than double the messages, since delays, gift questions, and cutoff queries all rise faster than volume.

Write standard replies for the ten questions you actually get, which takes an hour in November and saves hours a week in December.

Put the answers on the site as well, prominently, since a question answered on the page is not asked.

Set a stated response time and honour it rather than trying to answer immediately, which fragments the day and slows the dispatching.

And decide who answers, since messages arriving to everybody are answered by nobody.

Protect the dispatch window

Since the whole operation is really a deadline every afternoon.

Work backwards from when the carrier collects and decide what has to be finished by when.

Anything not essential to getting parcels out should be moved outside that window: messages, admin, restocking, and anything anybody wants to discuss.

Where two people are working, one on dispatch and one on everything else is usually better than both doing a bit of both.

And stop taking on anything new for the month, which is the decision most businesses make too late.

Know when to stop selling

The lever nobody wants to use and should have ready.

Where the volume genuinely exceeds what you can dispatch, the options are to turn off advertising, raise prices slightly, extend the stated dispatch time, or remove the most labour-intensive items from sale.

Each of those reduces demand without failing anybody, which is far better than accepting orders you cannot fulfil.

Decide in advance which lever you would pull and at what point, so it happens on the day it is needed rather than a week later.

A shop that quietly extends its dispatch estimate by two days in the second week of December has managed the peak, and one that keeps promising the original figure has not.

Write down what you worked out

Since all of this is learned each December and forgotten by March.

One page: the batch times, where the fast movers live, the standard replies, how many boxes you got through, and what went wrong.

Next November that page is worth more than a fresh analysis, because it records what actually happened rather than what anybody remembers.

Include the numbers: orders per day at the peak, minutes per order after the changes, and how much packaging was used.

Those figures are what let you order consumables and plan help without guessing, and nobody has them because nobody wrote them down last year.

The counter-case

Process improvement has limits.

Beyond a certain volume the answer genuinely is more hands, and optimising a process that needs three people to run at two is how mistakes and injuries happen.

Temporary help is also easier to find in November than in December, and somebody trained in advance is worth considerably more than somebody starting in the busy week.

And a change to a process that everybody knows carries its own risk at exactly the wrong moment.

Find the bottleneck, do the preparation work now, batch the dispatching, and decide in advance which lever slows demand.

This month

1. Time each step of one order.
2. Ask which step breaks at triple volume.
3. Move fast movers within reach.
4. Pre-assemble packaging and inserts.
5. Switch to batching twice a day.
6. Write standard replies to ten questions.
7. Decide which lever slows demand.

Step two is what makes the rest worth doing, since effort spent anywhere other than the bottleneck changes nothing at all.

The site side of this is covered in preparing the site for a busy December.

Frequently asked questions

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