Should I Hire Another Fulfillment Person or Automate?

Short answer: It depends on what the new person would actually do. Fulfillment is two jobs: the physical work of picking and packing, and the decisions around every order, such as which box, which carrier, what order to process things in, and how to split a shipment. If orders are late because you’re short of hands, hire. If your team’s time is going on those decisions, automate them first. A new hire won’t remove them, and it just adds another person making them.

The two jobs inside fulfillment

From the outside, fulfillment looks like one job: orders come in and boxes go out. In practice, the work splits in two.

The first job is physical. Someone walks to a shelf, picks the items, packs them and puts the parcel on a truck. Software can’t do that for you, and a bigger volume of it needs more hands.

The second job is deciding. Before anyone picks anything, each order needs answers:

• Which box? The packer judges what fits, usually reaching for the safe option.
• Which carrier and service? Someone compares rates, or a rule makes an assumption.
• What order do we process things in? Someone builds the morning’s batches, grouping by product, date or whatever the team has learned works.
• Does this need splitting? Someone works out what goes where when an order won’t fit in one box.
• Should this ship at all yet? Someone checks whether stock covers it, or whether it should wait.

Each one takes seconds, so nobody counts them. But they happen on every order, all day, and the cost never shows up as a line item.

Why hiring doesn’t fix the second job

When the team is stretched, a hire feels like the obvious answer, because the pain looks like not enough people. But if much of the load is decisions, a new person doesn’t remove any of them. Now two people are making them, possibly differently, and someone has to train the new person on how it’s done.

That’s the bigger risk. Those decisions are rarely written down. They live in the head of whoever has been there longest, so the new hire learns them slowly, and the operation still depends on that one person. The better a decision is, the more it tends to be judgement that nobody has documented.

When to hire

Hire when hands are the real limit. A few signs:

• Orders are ready to pack, and nobody is free to pack them.
• The decisions are already simple, such as one product, one box and one carrier.
• Your team knows exactly what to do with every order, and they just can’t get through them all.
• Your bottleneck is at the shelf or the dock, not at the screen.

In that case, automation won’t move the parcels, so hire. It’s also the cheaper answer if your order mix is simple.

When to automate first

Automate first when the job is mostly deciding. A few signs:

• Someone spends the first part of each shift building batches by hand.
• Packers stop to work out which box to use, or override what the system suggests.
• Someone checks rates or changes the service on individual orders.
• Your best person can’t take a holiday without things going wrong.
• Mistakes come from wrong decisions, such as the wrong box or the wrong service, rather than from going too slowly.

A simple test

Before you write the job description, spend a day listing what the new person would do. Go through your team’s day and put each task in one of two columns:

1. Physical: picking, packing, loading, restocking.
2. Deciding: choosing a box, picking a service, building a batch, checking stock, working out a split, handling an exception.

If the first column is the long one, you have your answer. If the second is long, you’ve also found out what’s worth automating, and you may not need the hire. Either way, the list is useful: it’s the job description, or it’s the brief for what to automate.

You can often start small. ShipStation’s Recommend Package rule can take over much of the box decision for boxed goods, and Rate Shopper can handle standard rate choices. The free Automated batching tool builds batches on a schedule.

When the decisions are too specific for that

Native tools handle the standard cases. They run out when the right answer depends on your particular products, packaging and carrier contracts, or on several decisions being made together.

That’s what Pro Automation is for. It makes the box, carrier, split, batch and hold decisions before your team sees the order, so your team can get on with the physical job in the ShipStation screen they already know. You still need enough hands to pack the boxes, but you may not need another person to decide what goes in them.