Quarter past four, and the orders keep coming
Your trade terms say orders by four o'clock for next day delivery. At twenty past, three emails arrive from regular customers, a rep rings with an order from a new account, and the web shop has two more. The office knows the warehouse has already started picking. Someone walks over to ask whether they can squeeze them in. Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes it is no, and it depends on who asks and how busy the shift is.
The next morning one of the late orders has gone out, one has not, and the customer who did not get theirs rings to say they were never told. Meanwhile the warehouse team is picking late into the evening because the pick kept growing.
Why the cut-off is not really a cut-off
An order channel that does not know the time cannot enforce a deadline. Emails sit in a shared inbox and are keyed when someone gets to them, so the time the order is entered is not the time it arrived. Phone orders are taken whenever the phone rings. Each channel reaches the warehouse at a different speed, and the decision about late orders is made by whoever happens to be in the office.
- There is one cut-off in the terms, but different runs actually close at different times.
- Some customers are allowed later orders by agreement, and only the office knows who.
- Customers are not told their delivery day when they order, so they assume tomorrow.
- The warehouse finds out about late additions when paper is handed to them.
The cost of a soft cut-off
Picking and loading overrun, so drivers leave late and early drops are missed. Staff overtime creeps up. Mistakes rise when pickers are rushed. And customers learn that the cut-off does not mean much, so orders arrive later still. The customers who do order on time can end up with a worse service than the ones who do not.
There is a quieter effect on planning too. If the transport planner never knows the final order list until well after cut-off, runs are built on guesswork and rebuilt later, and the vans that could have been loaded in drop order are loaded in a hurry.
The order intake we set up
- Orders from email, the web shop, reps and phone are all recorded with the time they arrived, not the time they were keyed. Emailed orders are read from the inbox automatically and turned into draft orders for checking.
- Your cut-off rules are held per delivery run and per customer, including agreed exceptions, rather than as one time on the terms.
- When an order arrives, the customer gets an acknowledgement stating the delivery day it will go on, worked out from those rules.
- Orders that miss the cut-off for their run land on a late list that the warehouse supervisor accepts or rolls to the next day, with capacity for each run shown.
- Accepted and rolled orders update the customer's acknowledgement, so they are never left guessing.
| Situation | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Order emailed at 4:10 | Keyed at 4:40, squeezed in or not | Timestamped 4:10, on the late list |
| Customer with late agreement | Office remembers | Rule held on the account |
| Customer expectation | Assumes tomorrow | Told the delivery day at once |
| Warehouse | Paper handed over mid-pick | One late list to accept or roll |
What changes in the office and the warehouse
The office stops being the referee. The rules decide what is on time, the warehouse supervisor decides what can be absorbed, and the customer is told clearly. Picking starts and finishes at predictable times, and it becomes possible to see which customers regularly order late so the sales team can talk to them about it.
Is your cut-off like this?
- Late orders are accepted or refused depending on who is asked.
- Customers complain they were not told an order would go a day later.
- Picking regularly runs past the planned finish.
- Emailed orders are entered some time after they arrive.
- Different runs close at different times, but only staff know which.