Always Learning and Adapting

The time is now and busy season is upon us. We have many different periods of being extra busy during the year here at My Father's World, but July and August have always been the highest point for sure. The orders come in fast and everyone hits another gear for the daily routines. In my time here at the company, I've seen many of these seasons come and go.

What has always amazed me here, is how much we learn from each season and how much we adapt going into the next one. I work in the production side of My Father's World. In my early years, we would have a summer staff of 10-12 people just in the warehouse alone, depending on the demand. This included hiring several temporary summer staff for June, July, and August. This summer team was responsible for picking and shipping out all orders that came in. In the beginning, we had a very cumbersome, paper-heavy, order fulfillment process. Large stacks of 8.5x11 yellow sheets of paper that had to be processed and maintained daily. We also had a very labor-intensive order verification shipping process. But each year we learned, adapted and improved our processes. Time and a lot of thought and effort from each of our team members has resulted in some drastic changes to those processes.

We started with eliminating paper pick tickets. To do this, we purchased mobile scan guns that allowed the pickers to scan each product that went into an order. This helped us in 2 different areas. First, it meant the picker could now access the orders with the screen on the scan guns and second, it meant the picker had to scan each item as they picked it, which eliminated the process of doing it at the ship station. This completely eradicated the need for the large yellow pick ticket.

Once we had the scan gun process in place, it completely changed the actual shipping process of all orders. Since each product was scanned and verified by the picker and there was no longer a need for that process at the shipping station, shipping an individual order went from taking anywhere from 1 to 10 minutes, to well under a minute, regardless of the size.

We also changed how we packaged our orders for shipping. In the past, we used a brown paper stuffing to pad and protect orders. This was put into the box at the shipping station. A few years ago, one of our team members found a different solution. We began using an air infused bubble wrap that could be put into the box when the pickers is done picking the order. It has been a savings to us in labor and shipping since the bubble wrap is much lighter than our brown paper. This also drastically reduced our shipping time for orders. Shipping has now gone from being the bottle neck of our order fulfillment process to the fastest part. With this and all of the other changes, our summer staff now consists of 7-8 people, including only 2 summer hires.

The way we've been able to streamline our process is just another example of how hard this team continues to work. They are always looking for ways to make our processes better so that ultimately, we create a better experience for each of the wonderful customers that we serve here.