Before sales take off: what breaks first behind the scenes

Growth rarely arrives gradually. An online store goes live, a contract with a retail chain gets signed, the season starts, or a campaign does better than anyone expected. Sales are ready, because that is their job. The question is whether everything behind them is ready too.

The good news is that you can check in advance, without any software at all.

A paper exercise: the double Monday

Get together the people who run order intake, the warehouse, dispatch and invoicing. Ask one question: what happens if next Monday brings twice as many orders as usual?

Then walk through the day in order, hour by hour. Who is the first to say “I won’t manage that”? That step is your first bottleneck. You are not looking for a precise figure, but for the place where orders start queuing in front of one person or one screen.

Then ask the question again, as if that step were solved. Behind the first bottleneck there is almost always a second.

Where things usually choke first

Order entry

If orders arrive by email, by phone and through the online store, and someone retypes the online orders into the system by hand, twice the orders means twice the typing. This is most often the first thing to break, and the easiest to fix: connect the online store to the system.

The truth about stock

The online store sells whatever the system says exists. With few orders, the odd cancellation for lack of stock is tolerable. With many, cancellations become routine, and online customers rarely give a second chance. Reserving stock at the moment of ordering, rather than at packing, helps a great deal.

Packing and dispatch

When volumes are low, orders get packed in turn. When they are high, everything becomes urgent and nobody has written down what takes priority. Written priority rules help, as does a picking list sorted by shelf location rather than by order sequence.

Customer questions

“Where’s my order?” Every one of those calls is someone’s time. Twice the orders brings twice the calls, precisely when time is shortest. An order status customers can check themselves removes a large share of them.

Invoicing

If invoices are raised in one batch at the end of the week, the end of a double week becomes the whole weekend. An invoice created at the moment of dispatch never builds a backlog.

The system itself

Software that coped happily with lower volumes starts to drag at exactly the busiest hours. A report that used to take a minute now locks the database while the tills wait. The signs are familiar: it slows at certain times of day, falls over at month end, and there is an unwritten rule in the office — “don’t touch anything while the payroll run is on”.

What you can do before growth, without a big project

• One place where every order comes in, whatever the channel.
• Stock reserved at the moment of ordering.
• Written priority rules for packing and dispatch.
• An order status customers can see for themselves.
• Invoices raised at dispatch, not at the end of the week.
• A check of how the system behaves under heavier load, before the season. Ask whoever maintains it what happens with twice the users and orders. Ask for it to be tested, not just promised.

None of this requires the business to work differently. It requires that what is done by hand gets done once, and in time.

When the bottleneck is the system itself

If it turns out the system is what won’t cope, the first idea is often to rebuild everything. That is almost always the most expensive and slowest route, and it carries the risk of not being finished before the season.

It is better to find out first where exactly things slow down. Sometimes it is one report calculated at the wrong moment, sometimes a link to another system that sends records one at a time, sometimes a database that was never tuned for this volume. Once you know where the problem is, a few changes in the right place and a clear order of work are usually enough: what to do before the season, what can wait, and what should not be touched at all.

If you suspect the system itself won’t survive growth, the review that pinpoints the bottleneck and sets the order of fixes is described on our software architecture consulting page. And for preparing everything around the system — orders, stock and dispatch — write to us before the season, not in the middle of it.