The alarm goes off...
Dani pulls herself out of bed, bleary-eyed. It's 3 AM Monday morning and she’s up before the sun. As everyone around her snores, Dani gets up and moving so she can make it to the office by 4 AM. Sure, the roads are lovely and quiet at that hour... but quite honestly, she’d much rather stay tucked up in bed.
But Monday mornings are huge at Royal CDS - there’s just no time for dragging feet.
A large percentage of Royal’s weekly orders come in over the weekend. Head chefs and kitchen managers do their replenishment orders late at night or in the early mornings. Those orders need to be ready for the warehouse to pick, pack, and get onto the truck at 8 AM Monday morning.
With warehouse staff clocking on at 5 AM, that gives Dani 3 hours until the truck leaves. That means 3 hours to release orders that are already in the ERP, and 3 hours to key in the ones that aren’t. Three hours to ensure every order is picked, packed, and dispatched.
And so she unlocks that office door at 4 AM, giving herself an hour’s head start and a fighting chance of getting it all done.
In the foodservice industry, these hours are not unusual. Royal operates from 5 AM to 6 PM every weekday - because that’s what great service looks like. They've been serving the Grocery Retail and Foodservice sectors for more than 29 years, supplying such customers as:
As you can imagine, the people at Royal are very busy.
But the team found they were doing a lot of manual data entry every day. Royal get orders from more than 1600 foodservice customers in an average month - PDF purchase orders in dozens of formats, different for each customer. All processed manually.
Dani, who could’ve been delivering amazing service elsewhere in the business (or sleeping!), was coming in on Sundays to key orders, then braving those brutal 4 AM Monday morning starts.
Errors and returns were costing the business money, and it all took up so much valuable time.
In 2017, we approached Royal with a proposal: let Lucy handle it. Royal could automate their order entry with Lucy - our brand new intelligent order processing solution. Lucy was just about to be released and we needed a forward-thinking customer to trial her and give feedback. The folks at Royal were keen to give Lucy a go. They knew they needed a better way to handle all their manual orders, and after 29 successful years in business, Royal weren’t the type to shy away from innovation.
Fast forward 12 months and Royal are now running like a well-oiled machine with Lucy on their team.
While they always expected that Lucy would drive efficiencies in their supply chain, Royal have experienced an unexpected benefit over the last year. Their happiness quotient has increased!
With Lucy handling over 50% of Royal's 30,000 order lines each month, the head office Customer Service team have found they’re spending far less time managing errors and returns. In fact, they’ve even taken on order processing for other states.
Dani no longer gets to work at 4 AM on a Monday. Lucy is handling all of those orders she used to process.
Another benefit Lucy's delivered to Royal? Career advancement and growth.
Lisa, formerly a Customer Service Manager, has been freed up enough by Lucy that she’s branched out onto the road in a Sales role.
Bringing Lucy on board has allowed the people at Royal to do what they do best - provide excellent service to their customers, all around Australia.