Exposition: Managing Your Orders By Hand
When brands scale, oftentimes the supporting infrastructure is an afterthought - growth and delivering for the customer is rightfully front of mind.
But as brands quickly scale, they add new tools on top of legacy systems, taking protocols that were effective when shipping 50 orders per month and bolting on other systems hoping they can all work seamlessly together when they hit hundreds of orders per day.
This habit of interlocking “band-aid” solutions is not unique to logistics.
How many systems do you use to manage the various HR tools (time off, annual reviews, etc.), or in marketing, how many systems are needed to send your emails? Under the pressure of rapid growth, time to find and implement an actual holistic solution is rarely ever given…and that is assuming brands are even aware a holistic approach exists.
What are brands to do?
In the above video success story, Brave Books, a children’s book publishing company, shares exactly how such a patchwork solution was creating errors and inefficiencies across its fulfillment operations, and how implementing a truly end-to-end e-commerce software solution has dramatically improved its warehouse fulfillment efficiency and order accuracy.
Rising Tension: Turning the Page on Fulfillment Software
Brave Books, like many brands, started out managing inventory with Google spreadsheets (many brands we talk to think that a whiteboard is sufficient). It relied on manual processes to try to stay on top of what was currently available to sell. This meant inventory records were easily inaccurate, with one wrong keystroke causing everything to get out of sync.
To manage its orders, Brave Books had deployed ShipStation. While capable of connecting to its e-commerce marketplaces, this solution was unable to interface with its Google sheet inventory pages, and lacked crucial kitting and bundling capabilities.
This meant the Brave Books team was constantly at risk of overselling kits or individual SKUs because its system lacked visibility into the available inventory. And this required the team to do labor-intensive hand counts of available stock on a near daily basis.
The result?
Brave Books faced SLAs of 5 days or more to get an order picked, packed, and shipped. The brand needed a new approach to provide a better experience for its in-house fulfillment team and its end customers.
Climax: Operator-Built E-Commerce Software
In true book fashion, a hero must emerge, and in this case it was an operator-built modern Order Management System (OMS) and Warehouse Management System (WMS).
Brave Books turned to Stord to be that hero. Our OMS, Stord One Commerce replaced ShipStation, easily integrating with its existing marketplaces but more importantly, giving them critical ability to create kits and bundles with ease - giving its marketing department the ability to build and manage its sales and promotional initiatives.
And by implementing our WMS, Stord One Warehouse, Brave Books could funnel all of the orders directly into a dynamic inventory tool that gave them perfect, real-time visibility into product availability - no more laborious hand counting. This effectively solved the fear of overselling products it didn’t currently have.
This interlocking system of WMS and OMS has dramatically improved the day-to-day operations of the Brave Books team, but it also improved its customer experience.
Remember how Brave Books was struggling to hit a 5 day SLA?
Well, in just 8 months with Stord’s OMS and WMS in place, it’s reduced its SLA time to 3 days, and is on track to reduce that to 1 day in the next 2 quarters.
Not enough of a success? Brave Books has already been able to double the amount of orders it processes per day.
Walker Jester, the COO of Brave Books said it best,
“I recommend Stord not only because it is a robust platform and has broad capabilities, but also because it has been evident that their team cares about the success of our company.”
Resolution: Buy the Book Improving Supply Chain Operations
Brave Books turned the page and worked with Stord’s team to implement our OMS, Stord One Commerce, and our WMS, Stord One Warehouse.
If you are feeling like your current logistics software is leaving your brand in the past, our experts are ready to help.
Let's talk today to get started on modernizing your e-commerce infrastructure.
Transcript: Implementing an End-To-End Logistics Software Solution
We've had Stord for just about eight months and we've already seen significant quantitative improvements.
Hi. My name is Walker Jester. I am the COO of Brave Books. We are a children's book publishing company in the greater Houston area.
So previously, we were using ShipStation to keep track of our orders, but to keep track of our inventory, we were just using Excel spreadsheets.
It did not compare to what Stord could offer.
A large part of our business is kits and bundles, and ShipStation did not account for either of those. And so it was a very manual process week to week, sometimes day to day to make sure that our inventory was accurate to what we actually had in the warehouse.
We were kind of always in this fear of, hey, I don't wanna oversell on our bundles and oversell on products that we don't have because ShipStation didn't account for that.
Switching to Stord, we knew that we were gonna be able to not have to check the inventory of our bundles and our kits every day, and that that would be tracked automatically through the system.
And Stord is able to set up a bundle SKU where the bundle available-to-promise quantity is calculated based on the minimum quantity available of the components of the bundle.
And it was important to us that that system could account for subscriptions.
One of the main benefits of Stord that helps with that is their SLIPstreams. Our subscriptions are bulk quantities, and so Stord's SLIPstreams are allowing us to print those labels quickly and efficiently.
One unique thing about our company is that although we are a publishing company that sells our own books online via our e-commerce store. We also have our own fulfillment center, and so we needed a solution that could not only manage our orders, but also manage our warehouse needs.
Stord's OMS and WMS is an all-in-one system that integrates perfectly with each other, and we never have to worry about the systems not talking to each other. Since integrating Stord, the amount of orders that we are able to process every day has almost doubled.
Additionally, our SLA has dropped from five business days down to three business days. We anticipate our SLA to drop to two business days by the end of this quarter and hopefully to one business day the following quarter. This improvement in SLAs is greatly going to help our marketing. It is something that we are going to be able to put on our website that will contribute to a higher conversion rate resulting in more sales and more revenue.
I recommend Stord not only because it is a robust platform and has broad capabilities, but also because it has been evident that their team cares about the success of our company.
