Last week saw the completion of all scheduled system upgrades by Proverb2’s retail clients for 2016. They have now entered into a change freeze to let system and process changes bed in well before they are challenged by peak trading over the Christmas period. The suspension of system changes during this period removes the risk of introducing any new problems through code or configuration changes (which can occur even with careful regression testing).
Each year Christmas peak trading ecommerce order volumes are higher than previous years, here are a few of the changes recently implemented to help our clients cope with this year’s demand.
Platform Upgrade for Redmoped.co.uk
One of our food and beverage retailer clients online business is growing at a fast rate and they were worried that the service level they offered their customers would suffer this peak trading period. There main bottleneck was the manual transfer of data between their web storefront and on premise ERP system. To overcome this we migrated them onto a SaaS ERP system (ExactOnline) and integrated it with their web site (which we also replaced with a new Magento storefront), carrier and email marketing system. The system went live in September and the client is now enjoying automated order management and increased international sales due to the new destination based delivery charges provided by Magento.
Virtual Stock Pooling
Another client of ours had an issue at their warehouse where replenishment orders for their web pick face sometimes caused the destination location to become overloaded. The solution involved a modification to the clients Warehouse Management System to implement a “Virtual pool” in which to hold the replenishment orders. This pool is then depleted by a “draw down” job which periodically checks to see if there is space in the web pick face. If there is space then the system automatically creates warehouse transfers to fill the web pick face with stock from the virtual pool. Proverb2 managed the specification, development and testing of the solution which was deployed last week.
Stock out handling
It is a fact of life that no matter how good your inventory management systems and processes are, sometimes a product is not physically available to pick when a customer order is being fulfilled. It’s not uncommon that this occurs on the fast selling items, which then results in “over selling” on products that the systems thinks are available but, for which, no stock physically exists. One solution for this, which was implemented in the summer, is to automatically suspend an item from sale on the web storefront as soon as a picking problem is reported at the warehouse. The solution also alerts a “hit squad” of stock controllers and merchandisers who then investigate the issue. If some stock for the affected item is located then the item can be unsuspended
Over the winter we will be managing the specification, development and test of the next set of changes for release to production in the New Year. This will be carried out more directly between Proverb2 and the clients suppliers to allow the client to focus on the operationally intensive peak trading period.