Lead Time

6 Weeks

No of Garments

10000+

Deployment

Nationwide UK

 

Our Mission

This project was an interesting one for the team at Matrix to wrap our heads around. Following an initial meeting with the client, we understood that we had found a company with reciprocal values simply looking for a uniform supplier who will keep their promises and meet deadlines. Fantastic. The initial rollout was going to be a challenge, a huge number of garments in a very short time frame at our busiest time of year, however careful planning and execution by our production team saw us hit our mark and deliver all of the goods on time.

The next challenge would come with the ongoing supply of the products. The items we would be supplying were available from stock, there was a need for the product to be embroidered with the client’s logo and a need for these products to be available with extremely short lead times. In addition, their agency partners had to have access to uniform ordering but with different terms and with a limited view of the products they could access.

The deliveries themselves, parcels would often be shipped directly to third party delivery sites which could be warehouses hundred’s of thousands of square feet in size, where the delivery driver would have to reach the site contact directly and deliver the goods. Like so many of our incoming clients, RAS were burdened with taking large deliveries to their HQ, splitting them for the relevant team and either physically distributing them or re-shipping them to their teams, we wanted to streamline this process for them.

The bottom line was, to provide a Guaranteed Next Day service to short-notice teams all over the UK, ensuring deliveries was crucial to ensure RAS to keep their own client deadlines. And to do so whilst keeping costs in line and offering full transparency on order volumes.

How we did it

This was a tricky one. Ordinarily, we would place this customer onto our Managed Stock Service, meaning we keep some dedicated stock for them in our warehouse complete with the embroidered logo and ready for immediate despatch. However in this case the volumes on the orders were extremely mercurial, from single unit shipments to thousands of units in a single day, with usage patterns, peaks and troughs equally difficult for our customer to convey to us, as their clients often gave them very little notice.

The ordering solution came first. We created an ordering solution through our Online Order Portal for the customer with the clients internal divisions and product ranges split into out into various product sections. We then created in such a manner that we could offer the permissions for specific sections of each range to any given user, tailoring what could be ordered by each team and ensuring only to items relevant to their contract could be used. We also crated custom options for Purchase Orders, Split Delivery Sites, Cost Centres, Recipient names and what would be crucial to deliveries, on site contact details.

By taking these on-site contact details, we were able to text and email the relevant contact on the direct delivery site to inform them when their parcel was 1 hour away along with live GPS tracking for the vehicle. This allowed the contact greater interaction with our delivery drivers and ensured a high delivery success rate on third party sites. It also helped reduced the burden on the client from manually re-handling deliveries themselves.

Internally we invested in smaller, faster, more reactive embroidery machinery. Meaning that whilst we had contingency stock available to service the client’s contract, last minute requests would be passed immediately to the production team to produce where there were stock gaps or large last minute orders. This has allowed us to keep our deliver schedule with the client and after two years, have enjoyed wonderful success working with one and other.

Testimonial