“We no longer fear Q4 peak periods. Wave OMS is the best investment I have made in the last 15 years.”
PAUL HEAVIN
Overview
Heavins Topline & Euronics was established in January 1984. Paul and Derek Heavin were relatively late to eCommerce, launching in November 2019 just before Covid-19. Boosted by the increase in online shopping during the pandemic, they have since built up a thriving digital business, shipping orders to every county in Ireland.
They sell a wide range of goods from vacuum cleaners to bags of nails. Some Web orders are bulky like washing machines and dishwashers which require pallet shipment.
The Challenge
Heavins internal fulfilment team struggled to deal with the sheer volume of orders during peak Q4 periods such as Black Friday & Christmas. Before WaveOMS, Heavins printed individual orders and shipping labels and then picked orders individually and matched them back to the shipping label.
“For two years in a row we hit a Bottleneck in November & December which meant late nights, early mornings, lots of costly over-time and taking sales staff off the floor in our large retail store.”
According to Paul Heavin, the challenge was “how are we going to get this mountain of orders out on time and not let fulfilment costs and order errors eat
into our profits?”.
As a business, Heavin’s management is never happy with the status quo. They
reconfigured their warehouse three different times but this did not bring them the desired outcome. According to Paul, “In peak periods, with an inefficient process you simply have to add more costly pickers and packers who are new to our business. This results in an increase in order errors & more returns. Customer Service is then tied up dealing with unhappy customers and organising the collection and resending of incorrect orders. Prior to WaveOMS “Our returns were running at 8-10% and this was negatively impacting our Trustpilot Reviews.”
Manual, paper based
Seasonal peak period strains
Just in time shipping
Staff distracted from other tasks
Inaccurate picking & returns
Revenue loss
The Solution
Paul and Derek Heavin were introduced to WaveOMS and invited to a demonstration at
Micksgarage.com. After the demonstration, they immediately knew that WaveOMS
would solve their “peak period” fulfilment problems. Set up and installation only took one
week, including training. WaveOMS provided a comprehensive site audit while Heavins
undertook preparatory steps, such as barcode labelling for all items to ensure order
accuracy. Wave OMS has completely transformed Heavin’s e-commerce fulfilment process. The
Consolidated Picking & Put Wall removed all the guesswork and dramatically improved
the speed of order flow.
0%
Peak period “Fulfilment Bottlneck” backlog
66%
Reduction in pick, pack & ship staff. From 6 to 2 workers.
14 hrs
A week saved. All orders out by 2:30pm (was 6pm)
Online order errors reduced from 8-10% to zero.
Directly saving €300 p/month in labour and goods.
Results
By taking a LEAN approach to eCommerce fulfilment with WaveOMS, Heavin’s have seen many significant improvements which have resulted in significant savings.
- The Peak period “fulfilment bottleneck” is gone!!
- Staff required to pick, pack & ship has been reduced from 6 down to 2.
- Online order processing that used to be completed by 6pm is now finished by 2.30pm each day.
- Overnight the number of “order errors” has been reduced from 8-10% to zero resulting in savings of approximately €300 a month in labour and goods.
- Customer Service is now free to deal with “Live Chat”, upselling and looking after existing customers.
According to Shannon Earley, in Customer Service; “Since the move to WaveOMS, I am now able to focus on generating sales revenue instead of running around with bits of paper sorting out orders that were sent out incorrectly. For example, I dealt with a customer recently on Live Chat who came in the next day and spent €6,000 on fencing.”
Other Benefits:
- Picking is quicker with less errors as ‘product images’ show up on picking tablets so a picker knows what to pick.
- Picking staff are given a consolidated electronic pick list, saving one hour of printing picklists and labels in the mornings not to mention reams of paper.
- Single line orders go straight to the packing bench while staff are alerted once multi-line orders are completed and ready for shipping.
- In the past bulky orders such as washing machines were delayed. Now a label is automatically printed in their “large item” warehouse reducing paperwork.
- Everyone in the warehouse can see a large screen showing real-time information on the picking, packing & shipping order flow. Managers can also see this information on their mobile phones.
The move to Wave OMS has transformed Heavins’ order fulfilment process:
“We now run a far more efficient business. At the end of the day, order flow through our business much faster with 100% order accuracy, less staff & higher margins.”
Paul Heavin, Director
Wave Case Studies
