CUSTOMER CASE
De Vrij Logistics: “With Simply Deliver’s software, we are completely ready for e-commerce”
Logistics service provider De Vrij is excelling e-commerce. Now that clients are expecting us to deliver directly to the consumers on a more frequent basis, the amount of orders is also increasing steadily. Which means that the demand is becoming more erratic and processing times must be shorter. “This created a huge pressure on the organization,” says CEO Dennis de Vrij. The manual order entry data became a huge bottleneck in the process, but then the company came into contact with Simply Deliver. “They offered the exact solution that we needed at that time.”
De Vrij Logistics once started as a transport company, almost a hundred years ago, but has now grown into an all-round logistics service provider. From its headquarters in Benthuizen, where it also has 20,000 square meters of warehouse space, it offers a wide range of logistics services such as forwarding, warehousing, distribution and the handling of customs formalities. “We have our own trucks but for many transport activities we now work with charters,” says Dennis de Vrij who heads the company founded by his grandfather.
Impact on e-commerce
De Vrij has many customers in the non-food wholesale sector for whom it keeps products in stock and provides distribution to the retail sector. “This sector has changed considerably in recent years due to e-commerce,” he observes. “Consumers no longer buy in stores but have their goods delivered to their homes, and this is increasingly done directly from the wholesaler. For us as a logistics party, that has a huge impact. Just think about it: where we’re used to deliver mainly in bulk to retail DCs or stores, we now also have to pick orders at item level and have them delivered to the consumer’s home address by parties like PostNL or DHL.”
Order-entry became bottleneck
A Typo is easily made
The logistics service provider receives most orders by e-mail in the form of a PDF file. These then all had to be put into the warehouse management system (WMS) by hand. “This was clearly our Achilles’ heel,” says Dennis de Vrij. “I could put extra staff there to handle the peaks, but they would then have virtually nothing to do the rest of the time. A manual process is not scalable and is also prone to errors. Customers use their own article codes which often consist of a whole series of characters. A typing error is easily made, which adds to the delay of the whole process and makes it necessary to correct the error.
A Solution for the problem
Peace and Harmony in a organization
Just two weeks after he signed on, Simply Deliver had the converter ready to convert orders for its first customer. “The tool is easy to use and after 15 minutes our people had mastered it. It really works perfectly. You just drag an incoming order to the converter and a few seconds later it is in the WMS as a warehouse order. Without any errors! We now use the converter for the group of customers who do approximately 90% of all the ordering. This has brought tremendous peace of mind to our organization, even at peak times, because of course it doesn’t matter to the system whether you’re running 10 or 1,000 orders through it at once.”
Rescuing during Corona
“Without the Simply Converter, we wouldn't have been able to handle the workload during the corona time”
Dennis de VrijCEO, De Vrij Logistics
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