Delivery days, pallets and customer collections for a drinks wholesaler

The situation

A wholesaler supplies bars, restaurants and independent shops. Most orders are for a specific delivery day, many are large enough to go on a pallet, and a fair number of customers prefer to collect from the warehouse.

The pallet network only accepts bookings a few days ahead, so orders for later in the month sit in a spreadsheet until someone remembers to book them. Collections are worse: orders are packed and left by the door, and the only record of who collected them is a signature on a printed note.

What we’d build

• Order capture and review for emailed orders, with the requested delivery date extracted and checked.
• Orders created in Brightpearl, with invoicing into QuickBooks carrying on as it does today.
• Warehouse devices for picking and packing, with pallet weights and dimensions entered on the device.
• Scheduled pallet bookings. Pallets due inside the carrier’s booking window are booked immediately. Anything further out is queued and booked automatically once it falls within the window, with the service chosen from the delivery date.
• A collections screen. Collection orders follow the same pick and pack process, then move to a list showing how many days each has been waiting. The customer is emailed when their order is ready, and the name of the person collecting is recorded against the order.

How an order flows

1. A restaurant group emails an order for delivery on the 23rd.
2. It’s extracted, checked and approved, then created in Brightpearl.
3. The warehouse picks and packs it on the 20th, entering one pallet at 340kg.
4. Because the 23rd is inside the booking window, the pallet is booked straight away and the label prints. An order for the 30th would show as Queued on the scheduled shipments page, with the date it will be booked.
5. A separate collection order is packed and moves to the collections screen. The customer is emailed automatically.
6. Two days later the customer’s driver arrives. The warehouse taps the order, enters the driver’s name and marks it collected. The order completes in Brightpearl and the invoice is raised.

What changes day to day

• Nobody has to remember to book future pallets.
• The office can see every queued, booked and failed shipment in one table, and reprint a label or retry a failed booking from the same screen.
• Collections stop going missing. Anything waiting more than a few days stands out, and there’s a name on record for every collection.

Typical scope

The Order to dispatch package, with the pallet carrier as the main shipping integration and collections included. The email alerts add-on is useful here to flag collections that have waited longer than a set number of days. See pricing.