How ShipWorks Helped Goodwill Central Texas Optimize Fulfillment Workflow for Growing State Contracts, Fueling Mission
Many likely know the Goodwill brand as a resale store and service organization, with an underlying community-driven mission to empower people. But some may not know that Goodwills across the nation fuel their mission to serve with more than just their wildly popular second-hand stores.
At Goodwill Central Texas, a number of behind-the-scenes programs exist for this purpose, including the Commercial Services Department. Through providing business service solutions for companies across the state of Texas — from recycling to fulfillment — Goodwill is able to drive local revenue for education- and skills-based training programs, and create jobs to employ hard working individuals.
In the case of their Commercial Services Department: a decade-long partnership with the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles, assisting in the fulfillment of vanity and vintage license plate orders, was a driving factor for needing to find an all-in-one shipping software solution that would improve warehouse processes.
The Challenge:
When USPS updated their label requirements to include intelligent mail barcodes, Goodwill Central Texas knew they needed to act fast in order to maintain automation discounts and add package tracking capabilities. After some research, Maurice Dunn, the Commercial Services Department Project Manager, knew he needed to find a high-performance shipping software solution for his team that would automatically generate carrier-approved labels.
Previous to signing up for ShipWorks, Dunn and his team relied on excel spreadsheets and manual entries to keep track of the thousands of orders they handled every day. In an effort to optimize the fulfillment workflow, Dunn wanted to find a solution that would also aid in the automation of their process and allow for more complex solutions, such as batch orders.
“What we would have needed to do to be in compliance with the postal service would have cost us a lot more time and resources.”
Maurice Dunn, Project Manager
Commercial Services Department, Goodwill Central Texas
The Solution:
After finding that ShipWorks could meet the needs of Goodwill Central Texas, while helping benefit the overall experience for their Commercial Services clients, Dunn contacted the sales team to get set up. It was the all-in-one solution that they needed to keep business operations running smoothly.
Another inefficiency Dunn’s team was able to solve was the ability to validate the addresses received from the DMV. While most major inaccuracies were often caught by eye and manually updated in the system prior to using a shipping software, there would inevitably be some that fell through the cracks. This would result in a number of unnecessary returns to the DMV, and added time to process each order.
With ShipWorks, this process is now almost entirely automated. Flags are created within their account anytime an address doesn’t exist within a postal database, allowing them to correct the address before investing in postage.
The Process:
With an intuitive user interface and great knowledge-based articles, it wasn’t long before the Commercial Services Department at Goodwill was set up and ready to start shipping with ShipWorks.
But, he says that the support team has been instrumental in helping him discover new ways to optimize the shipping workflow for his team. When Dunn asked the ShipWorks team if there was a way to optimize fulfillment for the orders being shipped to identical Texas counties, our team of experts walked his team through how to use the intelligent order routing functionality.
With ShipWorks, Dunn’s team was able to easily set up an automated process that would calculate how many license plates will fit in one box, generate batched labels, and then route multiple orders to one location to be dispersed for delivery.
“In fulfillment processes or any kind of workflow processes, there’s always efficiencies in where you’re trying to just take something that’s inefficient and make it more efficient. Systems like ShipWorks add tremendous value to making the process work more smoothly — to make sure that when somebody makes a commitment for a delivery or a pickup, it happens on time. It creates customer expectations that are really important.”
Kenny Hill, CEO
Goodwill Central Texas
The Result:
In addition to now being able to print USPS Intelligent Mail Barcodes, Dunn and his team have discovered a number of added benefits from using ShipWorks to fulfill orders for the Commercial Services Department.
The flexibility reliability of this desktop shipping software solution has enabled them to work more efficiently, save on shipping, and give more focus to what matters most: mission.
Want to see how ShipWorks can help your warehouse perform at its best? Sign up for a free, no-obligation demo of our software with one of our account representatives. We’ll even throw in a 30-day free trial so that you can try it out before you invest.