Supply Chain Stories with eComplete

The Wrong Trousers: A tenuous tale of percentages and data quality.

When our new client came to us with a brief to move them from their existing fulfilment house into one of our fulfilment partners in an orderly, phased manner, starting with just 7,000 units of barcoded, segregated stock in under six weeks, we thought – no sweat, we know just the team. You know what’s coming, right? Have you been here?

We got to work on the usual migration activity and began to match-make our client with the right providers from our vast network of trusted transport, fulfilment, and delivery partners for the job.

However, when we dived into our process, we uncovered, let’s say, a discrepancy or two. The reality of the stock was that it was mixed and incorrectly barcoded, which showed in the fulfilment order accuracy data, leaving disgruntled shoppers in its wake. When we took over the Customer Services inbox, there were 26,000+ unanswered emails. The cynics among us were probably expecting this plot twist.

This new reality meant our new client immediately wanted out of the existing providers; they changed their scope from reprocessing and relocating 7,000 units to the entire stock holding - a whopping 100,000 units. And they wanted it done in 7 days or less.??

Furthermore, our client now wanted to create an exit strategy for the mischievous stock, and what better way than a flash sale for our first trading day together; we were in a race against the clock.

Hopefully, you love a story with a happy ending too. Not only did we deliver these objectives against all the odds, but we also sailed through the process with a huge thanks to those who stepped in and stepped up internally and externally in our partner network and said goodbye to their weekends.

Almost as good as a happy ending to a story is a moral. We know that the ingredients of a robust supply chain agent are a splash of agility, resilience, and versatility, with a large serving of talent and experience; quality and data = success!

The client saw over 3,000 orders on that first day of trading - with all those happy customers unaware of the mountains that had been moved to ensure their new trousers, were the right trousers.

Interested in your own Supply Chain story? [email protected]