Stock control and back office systems

It’s been a fascinating past few months here at Pink Fish as our software developers have been working on a back office and stock control system for one of our clients.

As with many organisations, staff were using Excel spreadsheets to manually manage orders. Customer and order information was copied and pasted from the online shop into Excel, where it was then further manipulated as the order progressed.

This was time consuming and prone to data entry errors. It was also difficult to assign orders to delivery routes – this task alone taking at least an hour a day. Staff also had no visibility of how much stock was available in any of the warehouses.

Bespoke software development pays dividends

The new back office we developed is fully integrated with their e-commerce website. It receives order information through an API and displays this in an easy-to-use interface for system administrators. They can then manage those orders independently of WooCommerce. This introduces much more flexibility in terms of what they can do.

Actions include:

• Quickly accessing customer contact details.
• Bulk requesting balance payments on deposit orders.
• Viewing the items requested in any order.
• Seeing at a glance whether there is enough stock available to fulfil an order.
• Managing delivery routes.
• Sending emails to keep customers informed of progress.
• Filtering orders according to which products can be shipped to which destinations.
• Adding notes to orders so that everyone in the office knows what’s going on.
• Creating partial orders from existing ones where it may be necessary to plan a return visit.
• Exporting CSV files in required formats for courier companies.
• Managing stock on all products.

The advantages are numerous:

• No copy/pasting of data from one system to another – eliminating data entry errors.
• Clear visibility of stock levels – now you can’t sell more than you have.
• Bulk management of orders including requesting balance payments online – reduces time spent emailing and phoning customers for payments.
• Via integration with third-party software, delivery routes can now be instantly created and imported into the back office – saves admin time, increases driver efficiency and reduces carbon emissions through better route planning.
• Everything is managed virtually – cutting down on paperwork and printing.

The hope is that all of this will save several hours of administration time each week.

Supporting your business processes

Working on large systems like this is always a challenge. From planning and wireframing to coding, implementation and testing, bespoke systems development is almost always time consuming but generally very enjoyable – especially when clients tell us how much time they’ve saved and how much they love using their new software!

If you think you could benefit from additional software to support your business processes do please get in touch – we’d love to hear from you.