Ordering portal for a bakery plant

Bread is a daily product: orders are collected every day, inside a narrow window, after which production is already planned. Before the system launched they were taken over the phone — operators called round the outlets and wrote down items from what they heard.

What that led to:

• some outlets simply could not be reached — and could not reach the plant either;
• orders got lost: one thing was said, another was written down, and it surfaced at unloading;
• call-centre operators were tied up in mechanical dialling instead of working with customers;
• every error meant either an empty shelf in the shop or unsold product coming back.

The constraint was physical: the number of calls per hour has a ceiling, the number of retail outlets does not.

• Part of the customer base moved to self-service — orders are placed without an operator's call.
• Load was taken off the call centre: operators work with customers instead of dialling a list.
• Orders no longer get lost or garbled in retelling — the customer enters them personally.
• Returns are accounted for with limit control and automatic amount calculation.
• Order history is available to both sides, and transferring data into the ERP came down to exporting one file.
• Promotions reach every customer, not only the ones somebody had time to phone.

Above all, the ceiling is gone: the number of orders the plant can accept in a day no longer depends on how many operators are on the phones.