Warehouse Management System for SMEs

I'm Chloe Fisher, and I'm the director of Sendable. So Sendable is a third-party logistics provider, and we're Australia's first social enterprise 3PL. So we offer pick-pack services to both e-commerce and bulk commodities clients with the hopes of going national.

 It really came off the back of my son Byron being diagnosed with Autism and ADHD. Basically what we were finding is that all of his future career prospects and his schooling as well was put into a really negative light after his diagnosis. As we dug into that a little bit deeper, we were finding that there were employment barriers for people with a disability, and we basically said, "ok, what can we do to create employment opportunities for people with a disability in warehousing and logistics?". So that happened in 2019, and that's sort of where Sendable started.

We pick, pack, and dispatch with purpose, and what we really mean by that is that each individual item that our staff members pick and pack into their satchels and send out is done so with purpose in the fact that it offers employment opportunities an hour to people with a disability. So, I think that's a really big thing that we would like to get across is that you can actually use your supply chain to change someone's life.

I think for e-commerce clients, especially those ones who are utilizing a 3pl, there is a high demand to have oversight of their inventory levels at any given time, as well as the progress of dispatching customers' orders daily.

Through the utilization of CartonCloud, we are able to offer oversight of how many orders we dispatch per day as well as the inventory stock levels in real time.

Given the work that we do at Sendable, having a system that was easy to use and simplistic for our staff members to operate was a key priority for us.

CartonCloud has made the receivable of stock quite easy for our team, and being able to scan a barcode and allocate it to one of our locations and then have our staff pick from it all within like a 24/hour period. I think for the customers, they really like promoting the social enterprise part of our 3pl business, so it's really around focusing on those employment opportunities that they are able to create directly through the sales of their product. We're able to change the lives of these individuals, and as we're doing it, I always have my son Byron in mind. We don't have to have these employment barriers in place; we can overcome them, we can create an inclusive environment that everyone can have opportunities to work.

I’ve never worked in a place like this before. It’s an amazing family culture and the opportunity it offers is enormous.

We started in Sydney on the northern beaches, a brother and sister came up with an idea and got an opportunity to do mobile cool rooms and then ran with it.

Our objective is to be the best in the industry and provide that top-of-the-line in-house logistics solution, that’s fully accountable, fully traceable.

Because we do have four different tenancies between here and Sydney and Melbourne and Perth, we wanted something visible that could deal with our needs on a national level.

We went down the path of trying to make our own end-to-end solution. It’s a lot of investment, it’s a lot of time to go a backward step and create something that’s just not worth it.

CartonCloud came and we saw a solution that could really help us in that space.

When I was coming in, it was all paper, and being able to show the customer real-time stock reports, not having that lag between having PODs coming through. Everything's there and it removes all the admin process.

Adds to your product, it adds another factor that you can use in a sales pitch. It really gives you a good competitive advantage.

Sales leads come through the door, particularly because we have CartonCloud and we use CartonCloud to great effect.

We have four different entities on CartonCloud now, it’s invaluable, you can’t get it anywhere else. Just the way that it’s opened up the scalability of the business.

We’ve almost doubled in size, Chilled Queensland. The business as a whole grew 47% last year. We’re expanding our footprint, we’re expanding our square meters, we’re expanding our fleet, expanding into those regional areas.d

Some of the opportunities that are there are really exciting, and CartonCloud is a good system that can go with us.

My name's Deanne, and I'm the founder of Lexington Logistics. I founded the business 3 years ago, and the reason why I did this was because, there was a gap in the market.

We actually work with a lot of boutique clients. They could be fashion brands, gift, homewares, or lifestyle brands.

From having 3 clients to over 30 clients,  we are an extension to their business. It's something that is really important to us, that we aren't a complete third party — we are part of their integrated process and an extension to their operation.

That's what drives us every single day.

To hand over your brand to a third party is a big thing, and we want to make sure that we can actually uphold their values, their brand messaging, their key themes — to be able to then ship out their product exactly the same way that they would do it in-house.

When we do partner with our clients, one of the key features is having this software system, for them to be able to see that yeah we are serious around how we actually function as a business.

We do have a broad spectrum of omnichannel clients, there is a portion that are e-commerce clients — so  they run their stores through software
systems like Shopify, or Woo Commerce.

When we onboard a client, the first part of that
is to ensure that we have CartonCloud set up,  to make sure that their integration is spot on.

Once we have everything connected, they actually
don't need to really touch what we do and how it operates. We're able to integrate our systems
together— so it's a complete, autonomous process.

For us to take them on board, and see them flourish and actually start to do 20, 30, up to 100 orders a day — that's actually why we do the work that we do.

We actually provide access for them into the
system so it brings them closer together,  they don't feel like they are completely separate from their brand.

So the transparency is there, they are  able to see our stock levels within the warehouse, with the orders that are being placed and processed.

It's simplified our business.

It's... yeah, it's been fantastic so far.

I've seen the retrospect, working with other businesses in implementing different software— they do it so late in the game, you know, and it's such a big catch-up.

So, working with the guys at CartonCloud, I was a little client. At the time, I only had probably 3 clients on board. They didn't see that as an issue.

It was just — ok, what can we do to make sure that we set up some really good systems and processes now,  enabling you to bring on clients quicker,
and much more effectively in the future.

There are so many different things that a system can provide you that you actually didn't think was possible.

That was such a crucial part in identifying what could we be doing differently or better — but also letting go of the things that we were doing that we may not have been doing as productively.

When you're actually looking for a software system, you have to make sure that it's right for your business.

By having CartonCloud come on board, it's been probably one of the best moves that I could have made, and I don't think we would have
won as much business as what we do.