MyPost Business Label Rearranging

The challenge: you're shipping 100 orders today. You just booked 100 labels via MyPost Business. Then you just printed 100 labels - now you've got to match labels to boxes!

Get smart

Divide and conquer. When packing, we would split orders by their last digit - eg, order 29434 goes into pile "4", and order 29431 goes into pile "1". I say pile, but really it was a shelf with numbered locations.

Then, a custom script took the labels from MyPost Business, read their contents, and then printed the labels in batches: all the orders ending with 0 first, then all the orders ending with 1, and so forth.

Suddenly, when you have 100 orders, you (on average) now have them in 10 sets, with 10 labels per set - much quicker and easier to find and label.

This isn't an earth shattering change if you're sending 5-10 parcels a day. But when you're pushing 100+ and rushing to get to the post office on time, this is an absolute life saver and can slash your labelling time.

How it worked

When you complete the MyPost Business order, you are given a URL to a PDF for the shipping labels.

But you can take that URL, and feed it to a script. It downloads the PDF to a temporary location, and splits it into pages. On each page, it locates the order number. Then it can rearrange the pages based on this order number, and stitch the pages back together into a new PDF, and send that to the printer automatically.

Magic.

Applying this to other processes

Do you have a third party platform that generates labels for you or other data? There might be a way to rearrange it for better consumption - get in touch and I can see what I can do.