Modern retail and logistics environments are time-sensitive at every step of the workflow. As retail workers manage transactions or warehouse workers scan shipment items, every second of lag between order scanners and router data traffic can lead to costly delays that can impact every aspect of the fulfillment process, from inventory management to customer satisfaction.
What can modern retailers do to maintain efficient connections between order scanners and router traffic? While many try to mitigate sync issues by purchasing new scanners or retraining warehouse and retail staff, network optimization is the core issue that needs to be addressed.
This article details how businesses can maintain router traffic prioritization to help data from their scanners reliably transmit throughout the rest of the network, even when the network is congested with high transmission volume.
How Do Order Scanners Factor Into Modern Logistics?
As an umbrella term, “order scanner” refers to numerous devices that can factor into a modern retail or logistics fulfillment workflow of a business. These include not only point-of-sale barcode readers and shipping label readers but also mobile scanning apps and, in some workflows, RFID tag readers. These devices are the front line for data collection for retail and logistics-based businesses.
When used properly, they confirm where product is moving, communicate with the inventory management system to update quantities and potentially trigger reorders, update online stock levels, and relay data to warehouse management systems. This means that when order scanning devices lag or fail to function properly, businesses can encounter many issues related to data communication breakdowns, including:
- Products appearing in-stock in online stores without being available, potentially leading businesses to oversell to certain customers, cancel or delay certain orders, and lose consumer trust
- Inventory counts appearing distorted in retail and logistics management systems by lagging on count updates from returns, reorders, or inventory transfers
- Manual staff labor costs increasing as warehousing and retail personnel have to correct the issue, not only by finding labeling and inventory errors manually but also by fielding customer service complaints, order cancellations, and returns
For these businesses, operational precision relies on functioning order scanners. Yet, even if the physical scanners are working normally, network prioritization issues can cause many of the same problems.
How Network Congestion Impacts Order Scanners
Order scanners share data infrastructure with necessary on-site and IoT devices. These devices include IoT sensors and performance monitors, video surveillance systems, management platforms, video conferencing platforms, and even employee-owned devices. When the network is in high demand, multiple systems competing for the same bandwidth can lead to network congestion.
When using a normal network router, congestion can be disastrous to core workflows because basic routers often lack advanced traffic prioritization. For example, if a system-wide software update is currently downloading or video is streaming from numerous IoT surveillance devices, the network may be too crowded to process scanner data without a slight delay. Even a delay of a few milliseconds can cause syncing issues between scanners, inventory systems, online stores, and order processing flows.
If these delays are allowed to repeat due to network congestion, the disruptions can snowball into significant losses in productivity, increases in customer service complaints, and other fulfillment issues.
How Router Traffic Prioritization Can Help
Router traffic prioritization mitigates these issues by prioritizing important applications such as order scanner data transmissions and slightly delaying the data that can handle it without risk. For example, order scanner data should have a high traffic priority on the network router to maintain accurate pricing information, consumer trust, and inventory levels.
Additionally, less critical data packets can be delayed by assigning them a lower priority. Uploads from security camera systems can be assigned a lower network priority since a brief transmission delay will not usually cause issues. Order scanners should not be competing with these transmissions for router bandwidth.
Since orders are being scanned in and out of the system consistently, manual network monitoring methods won’t be able to keep up. Automatic router prioritization is the best way for administrators to set up their networks for success. Once implemented, the displayed inventory levels will no longer lag behind the reality, which can cause customer loyalty issues and inventory management bottlenecks with every delay.
Additionally, companies in industries such as food distribution and pharmaceuticals must comply with data security, pricing transparency, and transmission traceability regulations. Network prioritization can help keep compliance-related transmissions secure and consistent.
Implement Router Traffic Prioritization to Maintain an Efficient and Compliant Network
Order scanners are the backbone of many retail and logistics environments. As products are scanned in and out of the system, inventory, warehousing, and e-commerce systems need to update immediately. Even a second of lag can cascade into customer service failures and inventory management bottlenecks. Router traffic prioritization assigns order scanning data a higher network priority so that even when traffic is congested, these important transmissions can be processed with minimal delay.
At Allpoint Wireless, we customize corporate network solutions with router traffic prioritization to make sure retailers and logistics businesses can mitigate data transfer lag in their inventory and retail systems. Allpoint Command, our centralized portal, allows admins to manage traffic priorities and monitor system performance to maintain workflow visibility and proactively strategize solutions to their network’s issues.
Contact our team today to learn how router traffic prioritization prevents common network pain points in modern retail and logistics environments and how to set it up in your systems.