Ok – back to systems. M.O.M. was necessary but not sufficient. We also needed HarveySoft – a multi-carrier shipping software. After M.O.M. hooked up with Harvey[Soft], we were in a position to keep track of inventory, process orders, and print shipping labels – a generative software relationship. With Harvey we could ship via USPS, UPS and FedEx through the same interface.

We would batch orders based on the fulfillment line. And the fulfillment lines generally had to do with make-ready. Are these poster orders that we need to roll? Do we need to make desktoppers? (Desktoppers were Despair notecards in a 5×7 frame. for your desktop.) Despair was a great client – for all of the Amplifier amplification reasons, but also because early on we contended with make-ready questions – If I’ve got 125 frames, 150 panes of glass, and 108 easel-backs, do I make 100 Procrastination desktoppers based on last week’s demand? But now some sly exec decides he wants to send 50 Mistakes desktoppers to his team after a failed launch, and I’ve got all of my capital tied up in Procrastination. On the poster front, there’s no pre-rolling the poster orders – everyone wants Consulting, but the +1 posters span the catalog, and an order’s posters get rolled together. There’s a way through all of these puzzles, but we were just learning that the puzzles existed.

The packing slip print / sort was how we set the cadence for the fulfillment work. The packing slip printing was slow, but not the constraint given our labor – it was slower to pick/pack than it was to print a packing slip. I don’t recall if it was out of the gate, but we quickly moved to Crystal Reports as the means for generating/formatting our packing slips.