26 stycznia, 2018

Many improving online stores face problems with time-consuming completing and shipping orders. It is a result of poor work efficiency, because stockman’s responsibilities such as packages preparations, are not optimally planned therefore require more time. This leads directly to decreasing fastness of delivery time and increasing customer service costs. How can you manage?

As a software house we decided to solve problems with too time-consuming packages completing, so we designed and created application that allows to solve this issue. Meet Ariadna, storehouse automation system from Eengine.

What is the biggest problem with completing and shipping?

Completing and shipping orders for e-commerce clients is a complex matter. On one hand we have storeman moving in storehouses, on the other online shop’s „administrative panel”, where orders have to be processed. Additionally there are formal issues, such as receipts or shipping labels printing. In our solution we connected 3 elements in one, that is supported by Ariadna

How can Ariadna help you?

With our application, storeman gets already optimally charted path through storehouse for adequate number of purchases to complete. Packer gets tool to close orders and thanks to clipping it to online store’s CMS, client stays up to date with every step of his order processing.

The idea of this system was born, when one of our clients – leader of e-commerce clothing business, contacted us with request to solve problem of packing and shipping in his storehouse. We designed the solutions that contains:

  • dedicated server, that is responsible of the logical operationsł
  • android application for packingł
  • desktop (Windows) application for printing shipping documents.

As we already had the project, we had to choose technology. We decided to use PHP for server, Kotlin for Android and .Net for desktop application.

CMS, that we used to implement Ariadna was Magento 2.

How exactly does Ariadna work?

Functional principle is easy and one of her assets is the ease of introduction of new employees. Thanks to Ariadna the whole process runs smoothly. We have server and tablets supported by it. Server downloads orders from online store and creates a „package” for storeman. When the procedure begins:

  • adequate amount of orders is printed for the specific storeman,
  • order status is changed online and with the help of barcode scanner, the storeman assigns orders onto the tablets, that are on his cart,
  • after assigning storeman begins completing orders step by step,
  • every product in online store has his own position assigned and based on that server puts products in order, so the storeman can always go straight ahead (as Ariadne’s thread) and doesn’t have to go back or wander around the storehouse.

After completing of the last order from purchase order list, the storeman is headed to the packer position, where he can leave complete orders, detach tablets from session and can start completing new orders, thanks to the fact that the rest of shipping procedure lays in hand of a packer.

The packer scans order’s barcode, changes the purchase order status to „complete” and the system prints shipping label and receipt. Printing is the responsibility of applications written by us for fiscal printers and for automatic printing of labels and purchase orders. Both contain their own update mechanisms, so new versions are installed automatically when the application is launched.
After label is printed, client gets an email with informations for order tracking. Packer puts the receipt into the package, applies printed label and can proceed to another order.

Everything systematizes and upgrades the process of completing and shipping orders to the clients. Besides, you can see it in the following material.

Summary

As you can see, the system is user-friendly. It’s biggest advantage is scalability and ease of development. Thanks to the integrity of the system elements, scaling one of them, allows us to predict its influence on other parts. It’s the same for development. Path’s algorithm in storehouse allows for quite big expansion of the mechanism. We can e.g. teach the system to use „shortcuts” in the storehouse, which can significantly shorten the storeman’s path.

Ariadna was built for e-commerce in clothing business, but can be easily used in many other branches. It should be helpful in car, sports or toys industry or even zoological business.

Does you storehouse work in an unstructured or even chaotic way? Do you wonder how you can manage this situation? Contact us.

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