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Bespoke Transport Software Solution:

Bespoke logistics platform that processes the end-to-end delivery of 100,000’s of orders per year, powering growth of 1200% for our industry leading manufacture client.

Sector.

Manufacturing, Omnichannel Retail

Product description.

Multi-platform logistics & transport management software

Technologies.

  • .NET Core 3.1
  • Angular 8.0
  • RESTFUL API
  • 3rd Party API Integration
Skirting World's logo
%
Order Coverage
%
Reduction in Damages and Returns
£
Immediate Savings
pa
Customer Service Hours Saved

The challenge.

Resolving a range of delivery issues.

Our client Skirting World Ltd, the UK’s leading direct to consumer skirting board manufacturer, had experienced a rapid increase in sales in recent years. Due to the handling required and the sizes of their products they were limited to a small number of transport companies to deliver orders.

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 Skirting World decided to find an alternative solution (to the aforementioned Transport Companies) that ultimately would provide a better experience for their customers.

The business, who prides itself on an ability to react in an agile manner, developed a 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 develop the business case, assess the commercial viability and model the potential impact.

Using historic data processed through SWIO cloud-based manufacturing management software a proof of concept modelling tool was developed which allowed transport simulations to be run subject to a number of variable control levers.

The tool enabled the business to have the visibility and insight required to make well informed, data-led, strategic decisions. A model was discovered that optimised both manufacturing in the factory and deliveries on the road, that produced highly optimised delivery routes, and provided significant savings in transport costs, over using other third party carriers.

As the commercial viability of the concept had now been proven, an extensive discovery exercise then took place to determine exactly how best this could be implemented in actual screens and functionality, within Skirting World’s existing, bespoke SWIO system (created by ioSTUDIOS).

It was agreed that 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 would be added to the existing SWIO system, to accommodate the new logistics workflow.

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 Skirting World management to develop user stories and a fully interactive Figma prototype which ensured all the business and user requirements were covered. The user interface of this mirrored the modern, accessible design patterns and conventions of the existing SWIO solution. Test plans and derivative unit tests were also defined as part of these discovery exercises.

Several new integrations were also introduced into the software including TravelTime – that utilises Google OR Tools to provide distance matrix calculations for the route optimisation engine. SendGrid & TXTLocal – that were integrated for client communication. Ionic Framework – which was chosen for the new driver app which is deployed as a native Android application and integrated via API with the existing SWIO cloud-based manufacturing management software.

The result.

An increase in savings, and decrease in costs.

The software project was completed within four months and ran concurrently to asset procurement and team recruitment.

After deployment the business saw immediate benefit with 99% 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’ on communications sent in advance including reminders via email, SMS.

Customers also have access to a tracking page in which they can view the status of their order at any point in the manufacturing and/or delivery process. This includes, on the day of delivery, Customers being provided with a tracking link to the vehicle’s live location.

This improvement in communication, in which customers are aware of what is occurring at every point of their orders journey, has virtually eliminated customer delivery enquiries and resulted in an annual saving of 9,100 hours for their customer services team. The project will realise over £400,000 pa of direct efficiencies to Skirting World and provides a sustainable and scalable platform for which to fuel further growth. 

ioSTUDIOS are an absolute pleasure to deal with. From a technical point of view their work has enabled us to scale and grow rapidly – they are experts when it comes to bespoke software development projects.

LEE WATKINSON, hEAD OF dIGITAL | Skirting world

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