Ironmongery Direct: winning delivery with MetaPack

Winners of the Ecmod All-Round Business Ironmongery Direct, recognise how the MetaPack platform has helped them improve their fulfilment: strengthening their promise of next day delivery for goods ordered by 7.30pm and increasing first time delivery success to 98.5 percent.

Ironmongery Direct are one of the fastest growing multichannel suppliers to the trade; turnover for the half-year rose 25 percent to £7.1 million, while operating profit grew 40 percent to £750,000. With a catalogue of 11,500 specialist ironmongery products, the company are always mindful that getting the goods to the customer reliably and speedily is critical. Stuart Wilson, Head of Marketing at Ironmongery Direct, understands the customer’s delivery is essential to their business, “our trade customers are very much driven by a need when they purchase and in many instances the particular product can’t be sourced locally. Therefore we need to fulfil their orders as quickly and efficiently as possible as time costs money.”

Ironmongery Direct use MetaPack to effectively manage their three carriers through one system. The multi-carrier approach has provided them with access to a wider variety of carrier services and afforded them contingency should one not be able to deliver. Using MetaPack saved the time and hassle of integrating to each one separately and switching between them at the packing bench. They have further simplified processes by using MetaPack as a black-box behind their Warehouse Management System (WMS) and have built a tool that allows the packer to amend detail at the pack bench if the consignment fails, for things such as a postcode error, without having to go to the WMS and change it.

MetaPack enables Ironmongery Direct to flag and set parameters so that when an order is put through the system, the most appropriate carrier is selected for the job. It can look right into performance on a local level to within postcodes and analyse and make a selection based on criteria such as morning deliveries or large, bulky orders. Once the order is allocated at the pack bench the carrier label is printed ready to be affixed.

“We pride ourselves on our 7.30pm cut-off for next day delivery. Correct management of delivery options is therefore essential to ensure efficient service and to maintain the trust of our customers. This process becomes much more efficient using MetaPack. It has reduced our pick-and-pack times and improved our first time delivery success rate to 98.5 percent.” explains Wilson.