"Has my order shipped?"
To a customer, shipment communication is often the moment they stop wondering whether an order is progressing and start feeling confident it's on its way. It's not a difficult question. But when dozens of customers ask it every day, answering it becomes expensive.
For a recent client of ours, shipping notifications were an important part of the customer experience. Once an order left the warehouse, customers needed visibility into tracking information, shipment details, and supporting documentation.
The challenge was that although the information already existed inside NetSuite, getting it into the hands of customers quickly, accurately, and consistently was a process that relied on manual effort.
Someone needed to identify the shipment, gather tracking information, create an email, determine recipients, attach documentation, and send everything at the appropriate time. Sure, it worked—but as the company grew, the work compounded and took up more hours a week than the client felt comfortable seeing on paper.
They needed something that could scale with them as they grew. They recognized that as shipment volume increased, so did the opportunity for delays, missed communications, and repetitive administrative work. That’s when they partnered with Anchor Group to create an automated shipping notification process directly within NetSuite.
How it worked
Whenever an item fulfillment record reached shipped status, NetSuite would automatically evaluate a series of business rules before generating customer communications.
Sounds simple, but in practice, the logic itself turned out to be surprisingly complex:
- Customer pickup orders required different handling
- Tracking numbers needed to exist before communication could occur
- Multiple recipients might need notification, including purchasers, contacts, shipping recipients, and sales representatives
- Duplicate email addresses had to be filtered out automatically
- The system needed to know when not to send a notification just as much as it needed to know when to send one
Through collaborative working sessions and iterative testing, the project team built a workflow capable of handling these scenarios without introducing communications gaps.
The results speak for themselves
When all requirements were met, NetSuite automatically:
- Generated the shipping notification
- Attached the packing slip
- Included tracking information
- Delivered it to the appropriate stakeholder(s)
What had previously required multiple manual steps now happened automatically the moment the shipment was ready, resulting in not just time savings but a better customer experience overall:
- Customers received shipping details faster
- Internal teams spent less time answering routine shipment questions
- Sales representatives gained visibility without additional administrative effort
- Customer service teams could focus their attention on exceptions rather than status updates
Automating this important milestone in the product order lifecycle helped deliver a more consistent experience while eliminating hours of repetitive administrative work, and unlike most process improvements, nobody had to remember to do anything differently.
NetSuite simply handled it.
Thank you for reading Case Study #2: Automated Shipping Notifications
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