What we did
A business system to manage workflow
We built Yarn Collective a bespoke core business system which manages each job from enquiry to fulfilment. As soon as an enquiry is received it goes onto the system with full details of the potential customer – details which never need to be entered again. At every stage details on the system are updated, from sales order to purchase order from suppliers to fulfilment instructions for the warehouse. The entire process is visible and fully audited so nothing gets lost or forgotten.
The system also contains detailed information on all Yarn Collective’s products – rolls of beautifully designed fabric – held at the warehouse. This includes images, exact fabric characteristics including details such as whether it is flame retardant (and PDFs of the certificates that prove it), how much is left in stock, the location and so on. Stock is broken down by ‘piece’: each roll of the same material is recorded separately, as any two rolls of a given fabric may be very slightly different due to the variations that occur in natural products. The system is flexible enough to allow a section of a particular batch to be reserved for a customer – vital for repeat orders where an exact colour match is needed. Customers and suppliers are communicated with using whatever units of measure they prefer to work in, whether yards (US), metres (Europe) or inches (UK).
A phased delivery process
This is only the first part of a multi-stage process. After we submitted an initial proposal it became clear that a solution was needed as quickly as possible to support a fast-growing business. We responded rapidly, working through the proposal to make sure we concentrated on the minimum viable product and left the bells and whistles till later. This is what we built first and which has enabled Yarn Collective to grow quickly in a matter of a few months. The business has no need for an IT department, so we manage and maintain the system for them (and help with any queries), making it a hassle-free business tool.
The secret to success was establishing trust, which we achieved by working with the Yarn Collective team in a completely transparent way. Further targeted developments are planned to support the business’s strategic expansion. These include integrating Yarn Collective’s accounting system and creating a web portal for customers and distributors to reserve fabric and place orders. The system will also support an important sustainability goal by calculating the exact carbon offsetting contribution for each order delivered, based on the carbon dioxide produced by the processes of manufacture, stocking and shipping.
