Iain Lindsay, Business Development Manager at Sykes shares how small and medium businesses can create business success through a specialist fulfilment partner.

For small and medium businesses (SMBs), working with a specialist fulfilment unit within a global partner, can be incredibly beneficial, particularly if they have an online store but don’t have the storage and distribution facilities needed to effectively fulfil orders.

In essence, this allows businesses to enjoy the best of both worlds – accessing the resources of a large company while retaining the local family feel and personal service of specialist fulfilment partner.

Expertise

Successful order fulfilment can be complex and demanding. Working with a fulfilment partner allows SMBs to take advantage of their experience and expertise, leaving them to focus on other core areas of their online strategy.

In addition to this, large projects or specific campaigns might require skills that your team doesn’t have. Outsourcing is a great way to extend your resources, expand your team and skills, and gain other advantages, without the expense of managing operations yourself.

Flexibility

Sales can be quite seasonal, and associated demand can vary throughout the year with peaks and dips depending on the product in question. This can make planning fulfilment requirements very complex.

Rather than employing extra staff and taking on additional warehouse space during times of high demand, engaging a fulfilment specialist enables businesses to ease the strain and manage fluctuating levels of demand.

Resources

A fulfilment partner with the ability to leverage the resources of their parent company can deliver on business needs and any expectations that have been set. This includes benefits from the bigger relationships and networks built with carriers, packaging suppliers, and more.

An SMB expanding into new markets might, for example, face barriers due to a lack of infrastructure or resources. In this scenario, the fulfilment partner can use their reach to extent yours without the expense, time, and resources needed to implement a global infrastructure.

Cost

Having built global relationships and infrastructure over many years drives economies of scale and leverages purchasing power. A good partner will be able to offer economical materials and shipping costs to an SMB, probably lower than them distributing their goods directly, due to the scale of their operations.

This also means that your company’s fixed costs can be reduced, eliminating the overheads of running a warehouse fulfilment and logistics business.

End-to-end service

Working with a partner that provides a streamlined, end-to-end service that includes finance and customer services in addition to fulfilment allows SMBs to establish a strong relationship with a single provider. For example, the fulfilment partner with finance capabilities can act as the payment platform, taking payments, providing in-country tax support and acting as your business book keeper.

To find out more, contact Iain Lindsay on 01896 664 281 | iain.lindsay@sykes.com

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Cheshire based shopper marketing agency, ATOM has integrated with Fluid creative communications to create a bigger and more diverse agency offering.

Little will change in the day to day operations of ATOM with many of the client & planning team moving to the new, bigger agency. The ATOM team have relocated to Fluid’s Head Office in Macclesfield whilst also having access to the existing Fluid offices in central Manchester and London.

This integration will build on ATOM’s award-winning work in the area of shopper and promotional marketing while joining a larger and more diverse communications proposition with a bigger creative team, enhanced digital capability, film and animation services.

Tom McDonnell, Managing Director at Fluid, sees the integration as a great opportunity for the team to grow together. ‘We’re excited by the merger and are looking forward to the new opportunities that ATOM and Fluid working together will bring.’

Andy Duff, Founder and Managing Director of ATOM, will remain fully involved in the new agency structure as a non-executive director of the new group. Michelle Bancroft from Fluid will support the client team during the transitional process and head up the promotional and shopper marketing client group.

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