If your business receives, processes, manages, and fulfils orders, the chances are you have an order management system in place. That system may be a spreadsheet your team needs to complete as orders come in.
But as your business grows and sales increase, you might find that manually processing orders and managing them through a spreadsheet takes too long, that critical data entry errors are being made, or that you can’t easily give order progress updates to customers.
This was the case for Digital Converters, an online business specialising in transferring old media formats to digital. Sean Parle, Director at Digital Converters, comments: “There are a lot of different steps in our process. As orders come in, they are unpackaged, converted to digital, edited, then burned or transferred onto memory stick or DVD, before being packed and dispatched. Manually processing orders was becoming very time consuming, and the system that we had previously been using was restrictive.”
Sean goes on to explain why things needed to change: “Business was growing, and we couldn’t keep up with demand. Due to the quantity of orders coming through, we were spending a lot of time tracking them and trying to work out what processing stage they were at.”
Having outgrown their previous system, Sean and the team at Digital Converters needed to find a way to relieve the pressure on the team and streamline their internal process. Sean says, “We wanted to be able to track every order, from receipt, right through the warehouse to dispatch.”
Having already established a good working relationship with Sean over several years, we understood the pain points within the existing process at Digital Converters and could identify the areas that needed to be transformed to deliver the most efficiencies.
With a clear idea of these areas, the next stage was for us to devise a bespoke software solution that would integrate with the existing ecommerce platform, before putting together a comprehensive implementation plan.
As bespoke software developers, we use agile methodology to bring together people, processes, and technology in the most effective way, and during the development design stage our team produced a prototype of the newly streamlined system and process to share our thinking with Sean, before moving onto the build.
Business was growing, and we couldn’t keep up with demand. Due to the quantity of orders coming through, we were spending a lot of time tracking them and trying to work out what processing stage they were at.Sean Parle Director, Digital Converters
With the concept for the new system agreed, our development team built a version of the new order management software that would be put in place to improve efficiency and reduce the amount of time the team were having to spend completing manual tasks.
Installing the order management system onto handheld scanning devices via a custom-built app, as well as making it accessible via desktop, meant that the Digital Converters team would be able to easily scan and track orders from receipt, through the warehouse to delivery.
The software was developed to reflect each processing stage that a Digital Converters order passes through. Sean explains, “Having locations set up within the order management system means that when the order passes from location A to location B, the member of staff will simply pick up the physical order, scan the barcode on top of the order with the handheld scanning device, and then scan it to the location that it’s going to.”
Commenting on the benefits of the new system, Sean says, “It’s saved us so much time. The system has been developed in way that allows us to scan multiple orders very easily, it’s very efficient.”
The manual process that Digital Converters had been using previously meant that if there was a problem with an order, or if a customer had a query, it would be difficult for the team to work out exactly where the order was in their process.
Now, with the new system in place, the team can access real time data via the custom dashboard. “We can type in a customer name, order number and know exactly where the product is within the business and at what stage, and work out what the progress of the order will be, which means we can give our customers accurate order status updates and a better experience.” Sean comments.
Get in touch to find out more about how we could streamline and optimise your business processes.