What is it, how can it help and where are we up to?   

We know we’ve mentioned this on the odd occasion in the past and how we have big plans on introducing it into our everyday operations but at the beginning of the year we made a conscious decision to ensure this was done over the next 12 months.  

Ambitious – totally, have we lost our minds- probably, but are we up for the challenge, hell yeah!  

If you don’t know what we’re on about, don’t worry, we had no idea what it was all about either until we got started. Let me fill you in on what you’re missing out on.    

Basically, in a nutshell Advanced Warehousing gives us the ability to pick multiple orders at the same time, scan all our inventory movements while reducing data entry time and errors. It also allows us to get products in and out of our branches faster than ever, with systems predicting what needs to go where and when. This speeds up the whole process whilst also helping to ensure our accuracy.  

While we’re at it, we have also incorporated barcoding into the mix as well. The two projects go hand in hand, technically you can have one without the other but together they’re game changing.  

We didn’t realise how massive both projects were at the beginning, hence it’s taken us what feels like a decent amount of time to get the ball rolling. Doesn’t help that we have thousands of line items, which has created some interesting challenges and delays along the way, but we can’t wait to get this up and running and for you as our customers to feel the benefits. It’s vital as we grow, because we want to ensure our customer service is always the best of the best.   

Where most of our time is being spent:  

• Loads and loads of testing, tiny little things to make sure there are no hiccups when we roll this out officially 

Some of the small changes you may have noticed:  

• You would have seen by now that we have barcodes on our bag labels. 

What’s coming up in the future:  

• Specific hose reel lengths will be visible in our system so that we can give you exact measurements at point of order 
• Not totally Advanced Warehousing related but a cool biproduct is that we are working on an API with our freight company. This in a nutshell means it will automate a heap of the process and remove errors from a freight perspective.  

We’ll be sure to keep you in the loop as it progresses, and we should be absolute experts by the time it’s implemented so stay tuned!