How to Avoid Prep Delays
The most common causes of prep delays - and how to head them off before they happen.
Most prep delays trace back to a small set of recurring causes. Getting ahead of these before you ship is the single best way to keep a shipment on schedule.
The pattern behind most of these causes is the same: something the prep center needed to know wasn't communicated until the shipment was already sitting on their dock, instead of before it left the supplier.
Common causes
- Missing documents
- Shipment mismatch
- Label problems
- Supplier errors
- Unclear instructions
How to head them off
- Send a packing list before the shipment arrives, not after.
- Confirm carton contents match what you told the prep center.
- Provide label files in advance instead of describing labels in an email.
- Give suppliers written instructions instead of verbal ones.
- Put special handling notes in the request itself, not a separate follow-up message.
Scenario
A supplier ships 20 cartons, but the packing list says 18 - and two cartons contain a mixed assortment of SKUs instead of one SKU per carton, as the seller assumed. The prep center has to pause receiving to count and sort before they can even start the requested labeling, pushing the job back several days. None of this required a phone call to prevent - sharing the actual packing list and carton contents with the prep center before the shipment left would have caught the mismatch early.
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