OrderFlow helps Urban Industry keep down Black Friday packaging costs

In preparation for what is the busiest weekend of the year for the business, Urban Industry Warehouse Manager Josh Buckwell wanted to find out how much of each packaging type he needed to order.

To ensure he didn’t over order, Josh contacted Realtime Despatch to ask if they could tell him how many orders were shipped in a certain packaging type over the previous year’s Black Friday period.

“The previous year we ordered a lot of a certain type that we didn’t end up using, so I had to store them and work through the backlog into the New Year,” he says. “By asking OrderFlow for this report I was able to work out exactly how many I needed and order the correct amount.”

Rather than produce a one-off report, an OrderFlow support and implementation engineer expanded on the task, developing a simple reporting feature that would allow Josh to search for orders made using a specific packaging type during any given date range.

“A WMS generates huge amounts of data just as part of the process and there’s so much value you can get from this information,” he says. “It helps you see trends and make better business decisions. As well as Black Friday, this feature will offer benefits at other peak times such as Christmas,” he points out.

It took less than an hour for our engineer to create and put the feature directly into Urban Industry’s live WMS environment, highlighting the company’s ability to respond to customer requests quickly and thoroughly.

“It’s really easy to use and in just a few seconds I can find out what packaging I used during a specified timeframe,” says Josh. “The report meant I knew exactly how much I needed to order in preparation for Black Friday. As packaging has to be ordered in bulk, I am able to save thousands of pounds as well as free up warehouse space that would otherwise have been used to store the excess packing.”