Tracking orders and shipments with monday.com and Screenful
Feb 29, 2024
Monday.com is a great tool for tracking all kinds of work, including orders and shipments. However, you'll start losing visibility if you’re getting lots of orders and shipping them in masses (which I hope you do). That’s when you need to add a bit of analytics to the mix in the form of charts and reports. Here's how to do it.
Contents:
Setting up monday.com for tracking orders
First, you need to feed the incoming orders into a Monday board. If you collect orders using a different tool, the chances are you can integrate it with Monday using Zapier or Make. Alternatively, you can use Monday's WorkForms tool to configure an order form and embed it on your website. Here's a guide for setting up a custom form.
You'll also need a board to capture all the details of an order, such as the item name, color, responsible person, and the time the order was received. You'll also want to set up stages to track the progress of orders in each stage of the process. Here's an example board from Monday's Mad Hatter Orders tutorial. It has the following stages:
Pending
Processing
Packaging
Ready for shipping
Shipped
You’re not limited to these stages. You can add or remove stages to suit your shipment workflow. Go ahead and tailor it to fit your needs.
You can take your workflow a step further with automations. Setting up automation is easy, and there are plenty of ready-made templates to choose from.
The example board is organized into groups that represent the stages of shipment. Rather than manually moving items to the appropriate group when the order's status changes, you can set up an automation.
Every automation has a trigger, a condition, and an action. For example, when the Status changes (trigger) to Shipped (condition), move item to Shipped (action). You can customize the automations to fit your specific workflow.
Integrating Screenful with Monday.com
The Analytics & Reports by Screenful is available on the monday.com Apps Marketplace. Once installed, it adds an entry to the left menu that allows you to access your charts and reports within the Monday UI.
You need to authorize Screenful to access the Monday API to get started. Once done, you will be shown a list of boards. Select one or more boards from the list to be imported to Screenful.
Once you have selected the boards for importing, the next step is to review your workflow.
When importing a board to Screenful, you will be asked to pick the status column that contains your stages. Once selected, Screenful will automatically map those workflow stages to Not started, In progress, and Done. You can learn more from the workflow settings guide.
In this example, the Pending stage contains orders recently coming in and waiting in line for someone to fulfill them. It is mapped to Not started. Once someone starts working on an order, it goes through the states from Processing to Packaging and Ready for shipping. Those stages are mapped to In progress. Finally, the order is Shipped.
You can confirm the suggested mapping by clicking Looks good to me. The data import process starts, and you can access the automatically generated charts and reports within a minute.
Tracking the number of orders processed
Wanna see how many orders you’ve completed? Head to the Insights->Completed tab to see your shipment velocity and trends. The topmost list shows the most recently delivered items. Clicking the item name opens the corresponding item in the Monday board.
The Work completed per week/month/quarter shows the total number of items shipped within a date range. The numbers in the chart are item counts, but you can change the unit to any number column on your board. For example, if you have set monetary values, such as total value in USD, you can switch the chart to display total amounts in USD.
The type of work completed chart allows for the segmentation of orders by order type. For example, changing the grouping to Assignee shows how many items were shipped by person.
In addition to grouping by Assignee, you can group by any custom field such as Country or Product category.
The Completed work trend shows how many orders were delivered over time by the Assignee:
Looking at the trends lets you see whether you are shipping more items than in the past.
You can also track arrivals to each stage by following the steps in this How-to guide.
You can learn more about the Insights feature from this guide.
Measuring the cycle time of shipments
The Insights->Timings shows how long it takes to fulfill an order. The cycle time is the total time that elapses from the moment when the work is started on a order until it's shipped. Tracking the cycle time of your delivery process is critical as it helps you uncover bottlenecks in your delivery process.
The Cycle time trend chart shows the average time it took to process an order during the selected time period:
You can get even more specific by looking at the cycle time of each stage in your process separately. Do you know which step is taking the longest time? The Cycle time per workflow state chart shows you that.
Each bar represents a stage, and the numbers show how long it took to complete each step in the process. In this example, the Manufacturing phase takes the longest on average.
You can dig even deeper by filtering this data. For example, if you've labeled the orders by product category, you can compare the cycle time between different types of products.
Creating custom charts
To create a custom chart in Screenful, go to the Charts tab and click Add new chart on the top right corner. A modal is opened with a set of chart templates. You can either create a new chart from scratch or pick one of the predefined charts.
Clicking one of chart templates opens a preview with real data. You can select the data sources from the Data source menu above the chart. You can pick one or more data sources for your chart and see the results immediately.
After picking a template, you can click the Configure icon on the top right corner to open the chart for editing.
The chart editor opens revealing the chart settings. If the chart is anywhere close to what you’re looking for, you should be able to make it perfect with just a few adjustments.
When you click Create chart, the chart is created and you can find it under the Charts tab under the main navigation.
Once you have created the charts you need, you can schedule them to be sent as automated reports.
Summary
In this post, I showed you how to use Monday.com for tracking orders and shipments. Monday.com provides great flexibility for customizing the board to match your shipment process. However, you'll start losing visibility if you’re getting lots of orders (which I hope you do!). That’s when you need to add a bit of analytics to the mix in the form of charts and reports.
To get started with Screenful, read the Getting Started guide and sign up for the free trial.
Let us know if you have questions or feedback by contacting hello@screenful.com. To stay on the loop, read our blog, or follow us on LinkedIn.
