Warehouse & Asset Management for 1,200 Locations

The challenge

A retail network spread across many countries runs on things: equipment in every location, devices and spare parts, consumables, office and sanitary supplies, and everything a brand-new location needs before it opens. Every one of those items is bought from a supplier, shipped, received, installed or signed out to someone, counted, and eventually retired.

The questions are simple. The answers aren't, once you have hundreds of locations and several countries, each with its own suppliers and currency:

• Where is this item right now, and who signed for it?
• What's on its way between a warehouse and a location?
• What does opening a new location actually cost?
• How much do we spend per project and profit center, and with which suppliers?

This system was the company's first dedicated software for all of it.

The first version

Three engineers delivered a usable first version in about ten months, in 2015. It went into daily use straight away, and the system has been developed continuously for years since, growing with the network from a single country to 18.

The life of every item

Everything that happens to an item is a document in the system, so its whole history is one click away:

• Catalog of articles organised by class, group and model, with suppliers per country.
• Personal responsibility. Equipment signed out to a named person, so it's always clear who has what.
• Installation and removal of devices and parts at locations, plus works and services.
• Stock-taking with QR codes, so counting a location is done on a phone instead of on paper.

Requests, approvals and real costs

Locations ask for what they need through the system: equipment and works, consumables, office and sanitary supplies. Opening a whole new location has its own request type, so everything a new location needs is planned and tracked as one package.

Processed requests turn into cost reporting: calculated and posted invoices, monthly costs, and amounts split across projects and profit centers, in each country's currency, with export to Excel. Statistics show the top purchases, the top suppliers and how long requests take to process on average.

One system, three parts

• Web app for office staff, warehouse teams and management, with permissions set per user and per module, invite-based onboarding, and several companies and countries in one system.
• Mobile app for the people moving goods: pick a location, scan items to send them, follow them in transit, and scan them in on arrival.
• API that connects the mobile app to the same data the web app uses, so the office sees a delivery the moment it's scanned.

The ERP that came second

A few years after launch, the company introduced Microsoft Dynamics NAV (Navision), one of the most capable ERP platforms there is. We connected the two, so fixed assets, locations, models and employees synced between them.

For a while both systems ran side by side. In the end, the company gave up on Navision for this work and kept ours. Navision has far more features. Our system simply followed how their teams actually worked, with no workarounds, because it had been built around their processes from day one.

Ten years later

What started as a ten-month project for three engineers now supports around 600 users across 1,200 locations in 18 countries. It has grown with the network: new countries, currencies and suppliers, new request types, a mobile app for scanning, and cost reporting by project and profit center. All of it was added on top of the original system, without a rewrite.