Friday, 06 November 2009 15:56 Written by Keith Shay 3 Comments

As a publisher and as a business leader, you have to be able to delegate certain tasks in order to keep your perspective and generate ideas to grow the business. This is true even if you run a small publishing house. However, when you don’t have the talent in-house, the question becomes, should you hire or outsource? Many publishers, large and small, are finding great benefits to outsourcing fulfillment services.

The six primary reasons to outsource order fulfillment services are:

1. Organizationally Driven Reasons
2. Improvement Driven Reasons
3. Financially Driven Reasons
4. Revenue Driven Reasons
5. Cost Driven Reasons
6. Employee Driven Reasons

First, I will discuss the organizational reasons to outsource order fulfillment services in greater detail…

By focusing on what they do best, a publishing house can enhance the overall effectiveness of the organization. Typically, publishers are great at developing content and managing the editorial process. Managing the fulfillment services seems to be a secondary thought, and not many publishers can claim to be experts at warehousing. The real questions to ask are:

Do you really want to be an expert warehousing company or a great publisher? Which skill sets will make you a successful publisher?

As you develop the book publishing services, it will be necessary to increase flexibility in order to meet the ever-changing business environment. The retail book trade is continuously asking for books to be handled in a different manner so the retailer can increase sales or make their operations more efficient.

By outsourcing the order fulfillment, transforming the organization becomes achievable. Many publishers who focus on warehouse fulfillment are operationally driven. But, when order fulfillment is outsourced, the publisher can redirect their focus from operations to sales. Many of these publishers can find that being sales and marketing driven results in greater success and adds to their bottom line.

Outsourcing book fulfillment is an excellent method for improving customer service offerings, increasing customer satisfaction and shareholder value. When a publisher can deal with an expert in the warehousing industry, such as Ware-Pak, it will improve the customer’s satisfaction with the organization.

Over the next several weeks I will be discussing each of the remaining five reasons, one at a time, in greater detail. The combination of these blog entries will also be available as a white paper shortly. If you are interested in receiving this white paper, please feel free to contact me directly. I can be reached at (708) 587-4116 or kshay@ware-pak.com