Mintsoft x Bray Solutions: How Bray Solutions Reduced Their Error Rate During Peak Season
We caught up with Steve Mills, Senior Commercial Manager at Bray Solutions, to see what peak season looks like.
What does Peak Season Look Like?
Bray Solutions’ main peak times are Black Friday and Christmas – accounting for a large amount of revenue and is key to the profitability of their business. However, in the summer their clients often see a spike due to product types, such as BBQs.
Peak season challenges
Bray Solutions has faced all sorts of challenges when it comes to peak season – from stockouts to courier delays.
One of the biggest challenges Bray Solutions faces is staff capacity and availability. Bray Solutions has been chosen to alleviate their client’s challenges around peak times. While the team face an increase in orders, their clients still expect the same level of service and SLA’s. If required, temporary staff are brought in to help ease the workload.
Peak Season Before Mintsoft
The one feeling you don’t want to feel going into peak season is dread. Unfortunately, that’s what Bray Solutions felt.
Before using Mintsoft, peak season was a huge challenge - lots of manual order work and processing bottlenecks – as they didn’t feel like their previous system was there to support them. The team struggled with order creation, order printing and a lack of order visibility.
Recovering from peak season wasn’t easy. The team faced a few weeks of reconciliation against stock and orders, making it difficult to bounce back.
Peak Season Planning
To plan for peak season, the team start by getting forecasts from their customer and comparing volumes to previous years. The staff in the business were allocated to different areas, where cross-training has been done, and if they were short-staffed, temporary staff are brought in.
To communicate plans across the team, meetings are held prior to peak season, while account managers maintain constant communication with customers to manage expectations.
Peak Season Using Mintsoft
Mintsoft has had a direct effect on their customer satisfaction and labour management during peak season.
The team rely on a range of Mintsoft features – batch picking, automated workflows, real-time stock visibility and courier integration – to allow them to keep up with an influx of orders on a variety of products. The Advanced SLA dashboard has helped Bray Solutions to keep a handle on real-time activity on a mass scale.
“The advanced SLA dashboard gives us real-time oversight without it becoming unmanageable, and error rates (mispicks, overselling) have come down by roughly 5% — which translates into a significant reduction in client credits.”
With the use of Mintsoft, Bray Solutions has been able to reduce their headcount significantly over the last few years due to increasing their picking and shipping efficiency. The courier integrations have allowed the team to improve their dispatch processes, and bottlenecks have been removed.
The client portal allows their clients full transparency and visibility into inventory levels and order statuses – decreasing the amount of “check-ins” and allowing both the clients and the team to focus on operational spikes rather than keeping customers up-to-date.
“Mintsoft has fundamentally changed peak season for us. What used to mean manual order processing, bottlenecks, and being overstaffed just to cope is now a genuinely efficient, visible operation. Order flow and status visibility on a mass scale have had a direct impact on both customer satisfaction and labour management.
Where we used to go into peak with a sense of dread, we now go in with confidence that things will work as planned.”