Managing multi-location retail

Context

• The customer is a leading multi-location Bakery and Cake Production Company that owns a retail chain offering more than 50 stores across Pune city
• The company produces over 1000 cakes every day and it gets distributed across the retail locations. The retailers send custom cake orders to production units where the production manager spends several hours collating orders and making daily production planning. Once the production is ready to dispatch, the manager prepares dispatch notes and does the final dispatch. The entire process keeps the production unit on the toes and always at the risk of miscalculation or wrong entries as the purchase orders are received manually.
• The company approached OneGreenDiary to streamline the complex and overwhelming workflows. The core objective was to minimize or avoid human errors, wherever possible remove the data entry, automate the process, and reduce the manual intervention as much as possible from purchase order to dispatch process.

Solution

We develop a hybrid mobile app that incorporates iOS and android features to place purchase orders for retail locations and a Back Office web app for the production unit. The Back Office features an additional module responsible for interaction between the backend of customers’ Point-of-Sale solution.

We equipped the developed solution with the following features:

• Web Back Office to onboard the new locations
• Create new users
• Web-based stock module to accept purchase orders received from retail stores
• Single-click option to generate daily production report based on accepted PO
• Summary dashboard to view custom cake orders
• Single click manufacturing consolidated report to view the POs from all shops in one single file
• Option to partially accept the PO and do the dispatch from the same PO
• Retailer PO application to place PO to production and monitor the status such as PO accepted, Dispatched

Additionally, the system provided an option to create new production units and enable POs to be sent to the multiple production units from the same retailer app.

Process

The customer’s team included a business owner, a production manager, and a dispatch manager.

OneGreenDiary’s team comprised a business analyst with mobile development expertise, a project manager, mobile app and retail solution architects, Android, and iOS developers, as well as frontend and backend developers experienced in the web.

The solution delivery was divided into two phases:
The core functionality of the deployment:

Based on the existing version of the POS and its architecture, we developed the mobile app’s core features, including registration, authorization, product catalog search, order creation, and purchase history information, and more. The production dashboard web app has core features, including retail location control, products as per categories, stock control, dispatch, and reports.

Analytics and Push Notifications

We added the functionality that allowed the customer to collect important data, such as the number of active users, completed/abandoned orders, new registrations, app downloads, etc.
We also integrated the solution with FireBase to enable sending push notifications to the app users.

New Feature

Once the core functionality was delivered, our team continued enhancing the mobile app with new features on request. For example, we implemented a timeslot for placing purchase orders to the production unit.

Results

• We delivered a fully functional B2B purchase order management system in 4 months time that is seamlessly integrated with the POS
• We completely eliminated the manual intervention and data entry duplication at the production unit
• We cut down the production planning time from 5 hours to less than 30 minutes