With Growth Came New Challenges
After initially outsourcing its shipping to a third-party logistics (3PL) firm in 2015, Dollar Shave Club (DSC) decided to bring shipping in-house and needed a reliable and flexible high-volume shipping system to meet their increased demand. Their objective was to find a solution that would allow the company to easily accommodate its massive growth, while also offering the ability to “batch” process their massively popular razor “refills.” This batching would enable workers on the floor to bulk print labels, all for the same order type, and fill those orders all at the same time, in the exact location.
After a referral by their warehouse management vendor, HighJump (HJ) software, DSC selected EasyPost Enterprise Shipping (formerly InfoShip). EasyPost Enterprise Shipping has over 20 years of experience in successfully implementing high performance solutions for high-volume shipping operations across the U.S. and internationally.
How EasyPost Enterprise Shipping Helped
In collaboration with HJ, EasyPost Enterprise engineers worked to create a new interface between the two applications that allowed DSC to handle a high volume of packages while allowing for like orders to be grouped into “jobs” of up to a thousand orders a piece. The user is then able to go into the interface, pick an order type, and tell the system which printer to send to. Individual orders are processed in approximately one second, with multiple jobs moving through the system simultaneously. Any errors are reported, addressed, and rerouted through the system.
Lori Jackson, director of fulfillment for DSC described EasyPost Enterprise Shipping as extremely adaptable and always looking to see what its staff can do to help a business. “[The EasyPost Enterprise] support team is just completely engaged,” she said. “Their ability to recognize problems and then solve them is just uncanny. I would recommend them highly to just about anyone, especially from an ecommerce standpoint.”
A Solution That Works
With its current server specs, DSC can now process up to 12 jobs simultaneously (up to 12,000 shipments), across the two sites. At maximum capacity (12 jobs, one second per shipment), EasyPost Enterprise Shipping can ship 12,000 orders in just under 17 minutes. Before EasyPost Enterprise and HJ were introduced to the DSC environment, this end-to-end process would have required DSC to perform multiple manual steps, taking a substantially longer amount of time and using more resources. Jackson affirmed that EasyPost Enterprise Shipping’s work was critical to helping DSC grow as the company opened its second warehouse in 2016. “The ability to go from processing 10,000 labels to 100,000 labels in a short period of time is huge,” she said. “A lot of companies struggle with that.”
