Dealing with shipping and returns doesn't have to be an organizational nightmare. A client can save time and money and raise the perceived value of its products by including packing slips with integrated labels when sending mail-order products.
Five years ago, Drew & Rogers, a distributorship based in Fairfield, N.J., discovered the benefits of offering forms integrated with labels to large, mail-order suppliers. The distributorship has been offering this value-added product since. Drew & Rogers was working with a large book distributor that was generating multipart, continuous form packing labels on a dot matrix printer. "It was slow and cumbersome," says Drew & Rogers President Tom Rogers.
Distributorship Drew & Rogers, Fairfield, N.J., worked with one of its largest vendors, New Jersey Business Forms (NJBF), based in Englewood, N.J., to provide a client with packing slips that include integrated labels.
Drew & Rogers worked with the client to develop an 81/2 x 11-inch form with two labels on it. One label served as the outgoing shipping label, and the other served as the return label if the item needed to be shipped back. When an end user received a package from the book distributor, the shipping label was affixed to the outside of the box. Inside the box, there was a form with the packing list printed on it, a return label and a missing label (the shipping label). While the front of the form was stock, Drew & Rogers customized its back to include the book distributor's terms and conditions, and contact information.
Integrated forms often appeal to clients because they allow different items to work easily together. For the book distributor, the packing slip, shipping label and return label contained information informing the buyer and seller about what was being transferred. The shipping label identified the items in the box, the packing slip identified the specific product, and the return label allowed the distributor to quickly determine the item(s) being returned and the lot it came from. This eliminated inventory problems.
Drew & Rogers worked with one of its largest vendors, New Jersey Business Forms (NJBF), a manufacturer based in Englewood, N.J. NJBF operates a Tamarack machine that enables printers to affix labels onto existing forms for integrated solutions. Drew & Rogers worked with NJBF to ensure the book distributor's first run went smoothly. Test runs were carried largely to watch for one thing—ooze. "A big problem with all these things is ooze from adhesive," Rogers says. "When under pressure from rollers and printers, adhesive oozes out the sides, gums up all the rollers in the printer and the whole thing jams--that's not a good thing."
Adhesive ooze may not show up on the first 200 pieces, Rogers says. Often, high-speed laser printers don't get hot enough when running small orders for ooze to be a problem. But when printing thousands of packing slips, especially around the holidays, ooze can become a major issue. Drew & Rogers ran several tests of the book distributor's product in quantities ranging from 1,000 to 2,000. If large orders are guaranteed to follow, a manufacturer typically absorbs some of the set-up costs (such as tooling) for test runs, Rogers says. He stresses that if a distributorship doesn't perform a test run of products, it's setting up the application for failure.
The tests ran smoothly. Today, the book distributor continues to include packing slips with integrated labels in its mail-order packages. Perhaps the biggest benefit to the client was the amount of time saved, Rogers says. The book distributor went from a slow pin-feed operation to a cut sheet laser operation.
Drew & Rogers now offers integrated forms to many clients, ranging from large catalog retailers to the pharmaceutical market. According to Rogers, the market for integrated forms is growing particularly because of the growth of online shopping. For many small internet catalog shippers, using forms with integrated labels is an ideal way to streamline packing and shipping, and simplify the process of returning products.
—Kara Gebhart Uhl
Target the right markets. Retailers and catalog-shippers are obvious markets for integrated forms, but many other vertical markets exist. Drew & Rogers, Fairfield, N.J., sells integrated laboratory forms to the pharmaceutical market in New Jersey. Other ripe markets include non-profit organizations, hotels, insurance companies and trade associations.
