How to Prepare Your WMS for Increased Volume During the Holidays

Planning for the Holiday rush means looking into all the areas of your warehouse and your WMS that might need some clean-up or extra support before the increase in volume surprises your team.

The goal is for Infoplus to automate as many tasks as possible without overloading the system, which can decrease speed. Our in-house Infoplus experts compiled some excellent advice for how you can prepare Infoplus to best handle the increase in volume throughout the Holiday Season.

4 Steps to Prepare Infoplus for the Holiday Rush

Step 1: Utilize Pre-Cartonization and Pre-Generate Labels

Infoplus has the ability to pre-determine which size of carton an order will need. This will save your packing team time because Infoplus will make this determination for them. To set up pre-cartonization, you will need to have all your item’s dimensions populated in Infoplus. See this article on setting up pre-cartonization for step-by-step instructions to implement this:

How to Set Up Pre-Cartonization

Once pre-cartonization is configured, you can then pre-generate shipping labels. This removes a step at the ship station! Since Infoplus already knows exactly what is in each box, the correct label prints automatically for each order.

Step 2: Check How Many Triggers You Have Running

Review the triggers that you have set up in your instance of Infoplus. Triggers are sometimes used for a short period of time on specific projects, and customers often forget that they can switch outdated or unnecessary triggers to inactive, which will increase speed and lessen the data load being processed during order processing. We recommend performing a full audit of the triggers you have in place and consider reducing the number of triggers running concurrently during the holiday season.

Spot check your orders to see if you have triggers unnecessarily running on orders more than once per process. This can happen and significantly slow down things when hundreds or thousands of orders are all running triggers multiple times.

How to Create / Manage Triggers

Pro Tip: Apply the same audit to any scripts you have running. Scripts can also fire on orders more than once, quietly slowing down processing.

Step 3: Reduce Bulk Editing/Importing Activity

During high volume activity, it is highly recommended that users bulk edit or import in smaller batches. Batches of 500 or fewer will not impact the processes of your WMS during urgent and high-traffic order processing (like on Black Friday or Cyber Monday). Reducing the quantity of bulk edits and imports will help users to avoid timeout issues where the bulk edit/import does not complete because of the influx of Infoplus usage.

Pro Tip: Batches of 500 will not impact your processes as long as it is from one user. Don’t have User A and User B upload batches of 500 at the same time, or you may experience slowed upload speeds.

Step 4: Clear Errors from These Three Tables

Unresolved errors in these tables can compound quickly under high volume. Check each one and address any recurring issues before the expected increase in volume.

Alert Table - Use the filters to search for errors and see if there are any themes or recurring errors. Address them now before they escalate.
Shopping Cart Connection Log - Check for any recurring errors that can be solved before the holiday season.
API Log - Confirm that data is flowing as expected between Infoplus and connected systems.

Explore the FAQ/Troubleshooting Articles in Knowledge Base

The Infoplus Knowledge Base now includes a dedicated Troubleshooting and FAQ section for common issues our Support team sees. This is a great resource for searching for answers before you submit a ticket.

Covered Topics Include:

Smart Documents
Orders
Inventory
Shopping Carts
Fulfillment
Picking
Shipping/EasyPost/Parcel

Use the link below to navigate to either the Troubleshooting Page or the FAQ Page for each of the above topics:

FAQ/Troubleshooting