How Kid’s Avenue solved a logistical nightmare & eliminated mountains of paperwork
Stream subscriber Anne Ridgway from Scandinavian House/Kids Avenue spoke to us about:
- Life before Stream (& the mountains of paperwork involved)
- How easy it now is to quickly answer customer questions about stock & orders
- The unexpected cashflow improvements brought by Stream
Transcript
My name is Anne Ridgway I’m Director of Kid’s Avenue furniture, Scandinavian House
Before we had Stream, we were running our wholesale furniture business virtually on an Excel spreadsheet. Every day was a logistical challenge nightmare of orders. where they were, where they were going, whether stock was in, whether stock was not in, and mountains of paperwork.
So in conjunction with Proximity, Stream was developed which has been fantastic, basically. So all our orders are there, all you do is put in the order number you can see when the order came in, if the stock’s there, whether it’s out for delivery, how it’s going, which courier it’s going with, just like that when someone rings up, so you always know what you’re talking about.
Another big benefit is, as soon as it’s delivered, we can invoice straight away. So the minute we’ve got that signature there on Stream, we get notification and we can invoice, which is obviously brilliant for cashflow.
How Scandinavian House went from ‘managed chaos’ to full visibility
Stream subscriber Dan Ridgway from Scandinavian House/Kids Avenue spoke to us about:
- Managing chaos & reaching the limit of where they could get as a business
- How they gained full visibility right from the offset by ‘going in at the deep end’ with Stream
- How Stream has enabled them to adapt in the marketplace as the software has evolved
Transcript
I’m Dan, Dan Ridgway, I’m a Managing Director of Kid’s Avenue Scandinavian House. We supply junior bedroom products to big retailers, and small retailers, throughout the UK.
Before Stream, we were a paper-oriented business, everything was on PODs, a pile of paperwork was building up on a weekly basis for all the deliveries we had, and the paper chase, trying to get the paperwork back was a real bugbear because we had no answers until that was back with us.
It gets to a point where its just kind of, managed chaos.
We’d really reached the limit of where we were going to get as a business without any significant improvement.
What was exciting at the beginning is that we worked very closely with Proximity. We’d just moved into this new warehouse, so we kind of went in at the deep end. We took the plunge and went ahead and enjoyed the benefits of Stream right from the offset, and immediately we had full visibility.
When I’ve demonstrated to my customers how to use Stream and get the benefits from Stream, as a customer to Scandinavian House, there’s a little bit of surprise and envy because we’ve been able to adapt in a marketplace where you’d think it’s only the big boys that can have that software.
The features and benefits on Stream have grown and we’ve certainly cherry-picked the best bits as we’ve gone forward. Yeah, it’s a different product now to it was at the beginning, but a better product.
Route planning is “so much easier now” with Stream Go
Discover how Ian Keddle, a planner at Scandinavian House/Kid’s Avenue, uses Stream Go to:
- Pick the jobs to be planned then quickly load & optimise the routes
- Send job & route information straight to the Driver App
- Quickly resolve issues, as everyone has all the information they need
Transcript
[INTERVIEWER]
If you didn’t have Stream, if you were still doing it back on paper?
[IAN KEDDLE, PLANNER]
Oh, it would be so much harder. It would be SO much harder!
[ANNE RIDGWAY, DIRECTOR]
I mean, I don’t use the planning side personally, but I know for the planners there’s a lot of benefits.
[IAN KEDDLE, PLANNER]
So, obviously, we try and get the oldest jobs first. Planning’s been made easier by having this little button up here, where you can just click on that, it fetches up a button, and you can just scroll across and pick up jobs and then load it and then optimise it.
It just goes to the boys [drivers], it goes on their phone, it’s so much easier for them, as soon as they’ve signed it off it gets ticked on here, we know it’s done then, the job is finished, the day is done.
If they’ve had an issue with a job, the girls [customer service team] get emails so we know straight away that’s got an issue on it, so then they can create a service call, they can literally get on it straight away, so much quicker.
[ANNE RIDGWAY, DIRECTOR]
You can put a lot more information in now than you used to be able to do.
[LOUISE COOLEY, CUSTOMER SERVICE]
We can put notes in, we can see each others’ notes.
[ANNE RIDGWAY, DIRECTOR]
So that’s really handy because you want to be able to put as much information as you can about every order straight away. It just helps you know what you’re talking about really.
[IAN KEDDLE, PLANNER]
And it’s so much easier now. It’s just a matter of planning and trying to get the jobs out as quick as we can.
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