Over the years of providing our solutions to our various customers, we have seen many grow rapidly from grassroots business to national and international brands. One of our biggest customers in the retail industry is recognised as the “King of Convenience Stores” in Hunan, China.

Our customer opened its very first store in 2007 and by 2014, it had more than 300 stores. In 2018, they have successfully established 1,140 stores nationwide. In that very same year, they were ranked 16th place in the Top 70 Convenience Stores in China by the China Chain Store & Franchise Association (CCFA).

What were our customer’s requirements?

In a bid to further improve its foothold in the retail industry, our customer mapped out their plans to improve efficiency and realised they needed to implement a steady supply chain and unified store operations.

With over 3,200 SKUs, our customer experienced shipments with an average of 1 million goods on a daily basis. This caused a major dip in employee morale as picking operations would frequently go into overtime until 9.30 p.m. while those in charge of documentations would have to work until 10.30 p.m.

Another major issue they faced was the discrepancies between the number of orders and deliveries. Initially, they experienced 10 to 15 errors per day. This also caused inaccuracies in their inventories especially since they were using traditional inventory management methods that were based on ‘gut feel’.

How did we meet our customer’s order?

By the end of 2016 and after multiple rounds of screening, our customer appointed Honeywell Logistics Solutions to implement the Honeywell Logistics Solutions Warehouse Management System (HLS WMS) and Transportation Management System (TMS) to improve its overall supply chain and store operations.

After the implementation of the solutions, our customer saw an improvement in employee morale as warehouse staff were now able to leave work on time. With the new systems in place, the picking operation would be complete by 4 p.m. and documentations would be done by 5 p.m. Not only was it more efficient it was even able to handle larger shipments with a peak value of nearly 2 million goods per day.

There was also a huge improvement as the number of discrepancies between the number of orders and deliveries dropped to 0 or just 1 per day. Inventory management has also seen a huge leap in improvement as accuracy is now above 99.99%.