Case Study - Fitted Mirrors and Glass

Improved customer service and reduced office admin provides a platform for business growth.

Introduction

The phrase ‘digital transformation’ could easily be replaced with ‘company transformation’, defining ways of improving the effectiveness of business operations through changes to people and processes involving technology.

But finding potential opportunities for improvement means looking at existing systems, processes, culture and customer experience – not always easy when you’re in thick of it, managing a business day-to-day.

We spoke to James Blake, Co-Owner at Fitted Mirrors and Glass, about the solution Flow56 built to help streamline his order management process, and the benefits the system has delivered for the company.

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The system has provided us with a platform on which we can expand. We’re evolving from a company focused on processing glass orders, to a company that focuses more on the clients’ full experience, especially in product delivery.

James Blake Co-Owner Fitted Mirrors and Glass

A reflection of success

As a company whose revenue had been mainly reliant on commercial projects, James was relieved to find that his business was not negatively impacted when the COVID pandemic hit in 2020.

Orders to the Fitted Mirrors and Glass website moved away from larger commercial projects and became increasingly residential – homeowners transforming garages into gyms and doing up their homes during lockdown, for example. Although smaller in value, the overall volume of orders was growing, and it became clear that managing orders effectively was becoming an obstacle for the business.

With every product on the Fitted Mirrors and Glass site offering a choice of up to forty different purchasing options such as type, shape, size, edging and wall fixings (to name a few), there are millions of possible variations.

James and his team were using a colour-coded spreadsheet to keep track of orders as they came in, logging the unique specifications for each order manually. With an increase in orders as lockdown continued, just keeping the spreadsheet updated was taking around three hours every day, and with so many potential combinations there was a high risk of data entry errors.

Something needed to change.

Through the looking glass

Having established a good working relationship with Fitted Mirrors and Glass over a number of years, James was open with us about the impact that this shift in customer base and purchasing habits was having.

James’s key objective was always to provide an outstanding level of customer service, and once we understood the information that James and his team needed to extract from the system to achieve this, we were able to recommend a way to automate and streamline their internal process.

Through working closely with James and his team to analyse their workflows and processes, it was clear that an ‘out of the box’ system would not be the right solution, and that to move seamlessly from manually inputting data to digitally tracking orders would require some custom software development.

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Our focus needed to be on the customer service we provide. We have to be able to provide customers with updates on where their orders are. The new system had to have the ability to easily share the information inputted between the office and factory workers so that we always had clarity on each individual order’s progress.

James Blake Co-Owner Fitted Mirrors and Glass

The customised order management system was built completely from scratch and tailored to meet the company’s unique requirements, providing real-time data, KPI reporting and automatically generating an audit trail, all of which had previously been a manual process.

The Fitted Mirrors and Glass team were provided with handheld scanning devices loaded with a custom-built app for the system, allowing the team to scan and track orders as they move through different stages of the warehouse, through to dispatch.

“In order to provide our customers with a first-class service, it’s crucial that we can give fast, accurate updates on where orders are. The new system had to have the ability to easily share the information inputted between the office and factory workers so that we always had clarity on each individual order’s progress,“ James explains.

With fewer employees coming to the office every day due to the pandemic restrictions, implementing the new system and training the team at Fitted Mirrors and Glass was a challenge. James explains,” Due to COVID, we weren’t sure which employees would be coming into the office every week, and so the transition to the new system took a little longer than we anticipated. It could have been a disaster, but the team at Flow56 understood what we needed and made the process very easy”.

Delivering a pane – free process

Once the new system had been put in place and the staff training complete, the team immediately began to see the impact it was making on the business. James comments,

”The new system is so much easier to use – we’re able to see all the customer notes, queries and delivery information in one place, and the whole team has access to the same information. We can resolve queries quickly, so it’s less stressful and the overall customer experience has been improved.

“Before the system was in place, we were drowning in paperwork and it was restricting the business. If we were still using the old system with the volume of orders we have now, we would have collapsed. The new system has relieved the pressure on the office staff, meaning that now the only limiting factor is the size of our factory!”

A building block for scalability

James is clear about the benefits the systems has had, commenting,

“I can honestly say that the system Flow56 has built has been transformational. It has allowed us to plan future expansion and will act as a foundation block for our business growth over the next 5-10 years”.

Client feedback

“

Flow56 are so good to work with, they’re conscientious and make sure we get the very best result. The whole team have made the process so easy for us.

James Blake Co-Owner Fitted Mirrors and Glass

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Save you hours of manual work and eliminate costly errors by automating critical processes
Centralise all your tools and sales channels
Build you the perfect bespoke platform that will support your long-term growth aspirations

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