SWIO: Transport Management Software
Skirting World
Manufacturing, Omnichannel Retail
Multi-platform Logistics & Transport Management Software.
- .NET Core 3.1
- Angular 8.0
- RESTFUL API
- Third Party API Integration
The Challenge
Resolving a range of delivery issues
As the UK’s leading direct to consumer skirting board manufacturer Skirting World Ltd had rapidly scaled their sales over the previous eighteen months. Due to the handling required and the unconventional sizes of their products they were limited to a small number of specialist transport companies to deliver their orders, the majority of deliveries are to residential consumers undertaking DIY projects.
Faced with a combination of an unacceptable number of products being damaged during transport, unreliable delivery windows, a growing volume of delivery related customer enquiries and hefty transport price increases the company knew they needed to find an alternative solution which offered a significantly better experience for their customers. As an agile scale up, the business needed to understand and the develop the business case for quickly, cost-effectively, and sustainably implementing its own transport infrastructure.
The Solution
Bringing the Delivery process in-house
With a successful and proven relationship in place from previous projects the senior leadership team at Skirting World approached ioSTUDIOS to initially to develop the business case, assess the commerical viability and model the potential impact.
Using historic data processed through SWIO cloud-based manufacturing management software a proof of concept software model was developed which allowed transport simulations to be run subject to a number of variable control levers. The model enabled the business to have visibility and insight to make well informed strategic decisions. This resulted in concluding to adopt a model which optimised manufacturing to produce orders based on the most efficient delivery routes with the minimum number of machine tool changes over a constrained number of business days. This model produced highly optimised delivery routes, and demonstrated overall significant savings in transport costs compared to using third party carriers.
Once the commercial viability had been established and the resource commitment concluded, an extensive discovery exercise took place to determine how to utilise technology in order to achieve the greatest efficiencies possible. It was agreed that the existing manufacturing management application would be developed further to include new modules for automated delivery route generation and optimisation, live monitoring of routes and deliveries, transport administration (vehicles, fuel, maintenance, fines and penalties, compliance), customer ordering tracking, customer communications and a revised despatch module to reflect the change in process. Alongside this a new delivery driver App would be developed which would manage vehicle inspections, drop lists, delivery handover process and navigation.
The ioSTUDIOS team worked closely with the Skirting World management to develop user stories and a full interactive system prototype built in Figma which ensured all the business and user requirements were covered. The user experience mirrored the modern, accessible design patterns and conventions which the Skirting World team were familiar with in the live SWIO cloud-based manufacturing management software. Test plans and derivative unit tests were defined as part of these discovery exercises.
The software build was highly focused and delivered at pace with daily stand-ups, regular client show and tells and continual monitoring of progress. The existing software is built in .netCORE with a decoupled Angular presentation layer and a MSSQL database.
Several new integrations were introduced into the software including TravelTime who provide the distance matrix calculations for our route optimisation engine which utilises Google OR Tools. SendGrid and TXTLocal were integrated for client communication. Ionic Framework was chosen for the new driver app which is deployed as a native Andriod application and integrated via API with SWIO cloud-based manufacturing management software.
The Result
An increase in savings, and decrease in costs
The software project was executed within four months and ran concurrently to asset procurement and team recruitment. After deployment the business saw immediate benefit with 97% of orders being switched to internal transport which overnight eliminated the problems associated with damages and non-deliveries. Customers are now provided a delivery date and 2 hour delivery window a week in advance with reminders via email, SMS and access to a tracking page to view the status of their order at any point.
On the day of deliver they are provided with a live tracking link to the vehicle. The improved communication has virtually eliminated customer delivery enquiries and resulted in an annual saving of 9100 hours for the customer services team. The project will realise over £400,000 of direct efficiencies to Skirting World and provides a sustainable and scalable platform for which to fuel further growth.
