How do you adapt and learn new Shipping & Receiving software and tools as they become available?

In my experience within shipping it’s is best to know a handful of broad topics that directly impact your specific responsibilities and role. An example would be how your role impacts the relation that your company has its direct customers. In shipping timeliness is crucial to keep up with demand and deadlines given to the customer. Also understanding your software utilization and how long it takes for each product to go through the process for shipment helps to determine a viable workload per day. The fundamentals of Shipping is about understanding product portfolio to inventory management to process improvements to end with shipping. Take these ideas into account and you can form a plan for mastering your role for shipping.

Shipping and receiving often touches many different departments and teams, such as project management, procurement, logistics and inventory teams. Each have an important step in the process, and they all rely on each other for mission success. One of the largest hurdles is making sure communication is clear throughout the process - All teams involved need to have the right information, when they need it, every time. Software can be leveraged to facilitate that communication, and allow each departments' requirements and expectations to be incorporated into the workflow. This can allow all parties to focus on what they are good at. There is also an opportunity to track metric data to better understand areas of improvement.

Before adopting any new technology, it is crucial to reflect on your needs and pain points (as a business, as an industry, or even as a working professional within an industry). There is likely to be a gap, a grievance that can be solved using a software/tool. Without assessing your needs and goals, you will either adopt a poorly fit software choice based on other people’s choices (bandwagon effect), or fail to solve your unique pain point.

Having a deep knowledge base and resources relating to the software is important - "we don't know what we don't know". If possible coordinate with other peers within your organization who have experience with the software. They will not only have an understanding of the tools, but also how the business functions and the unique requirements within. Another consideration is requesting training from the software provider as apart of the service agreement. The provider wants you to succeed with their product and may have a point of contact that can address issues and questions in a dedicated fashion.

It can be incredibly difficult to shift from legacy ways of doing, where “our way” feels like the right and only option. In such cases, we encourage our clients to continually feed back ideas and concerns to us. Creating a window of communication enables us to support them with a bespoke explanation that solves their need without putting into question their beliefs. Everyone learns and adopts new tech differently - sometimes, a presentation is enough, at other times more handholding is required. Keeping an open exchange enables us to provide the right methods and resources. There’s never a one-size-fits-all approach to software-adoption.

This is a great point. Adoption takes time - even more so with new technologies and software. Once having decided to adopt a specific tool, it is important to give it time and keep an open mind. Building trust is a process, but commercial software exists because it solves a real, deep-rooted issue. You must trust it to do the job for you: from this point of view it is a cooperation, a practice in developing a new relationship with the tool, until it will almost feel like it works on autopilot.

We often work with new tools, and on the warehouse floor making sure team members use them properly is crucial. We have battled this by creating detailed SOP's with graceful failure options. This means that things should always follow an SOP, but in the case they don't there is a graceful way to report the error, so things don't get lost in the cracks. This allows us to be a better warehouse for our customers, and empower our team to do better work.

There’s always something new being developed. Or conversely, there’s always something you find needs to exist but doesn’t. Our team at @Spot Ship treats our software like a living, breathing organism as opposed to a one-off product, and we like to onboard all feedback and suggestions to make the product more efficient and impactful. We believe this is what has placed us amongst the industry-leaders in just a matter of a few years.

It is important to pause and reflect on how the software is actually fitting into your role and business. It might possibly be a perfect fit, or more can be done to tailor it exactly to your needs. It is only via communication and creation that you can achieve the ideal solution from your software provider.

The most important advice is to keep an open mind. The usual way is not necessarily the best way, and it doesn’t mean you will not be able to adjust well or fully embrace a change in software/tools available. The industry I operate in is a good example. Shipbroking is conservative and generally technophobic, where technical upgrades are looked down at by most, despite potentially saving time and money. In my opinion, mindset acts as a big differentiator between those industries that become technologically advanced, v/s those that remain rooted in habits.

Stop 🛑 being so hard on yourself. Take it slowly, one ☝️ task at a time. You are a lean, mean ,logistics machine . 99% is good 👍 enough . “Now that we don’t have to be perfect , we can be good”. John Steinbeck