The client
The Edinburgh Butter Company, a producer selling to shops and distributors, with several people working in the system at once.
The problem
The business ran on spreadsheets. Orders, customer delivery days, courier sheets, pricing and production yield each lived in a different file, and every one of them was updated by hand. The work was repetitive, easy to get wrong, and impossible to see the whole of at once.
What we built
One platform for the week. Customers with their delivery days, carriers and pricing; the order form; courier sheets that print themselves; products and pricing with bulk changes; production and yield tracking; and a dashboard that shows the week, the month, the year and lifetime side by side. Work that took hours of manual entry is now one or two clicks.
What changed
Everything is measurable, so it can be analysed. The business can look at yield, revenue and output over time and get a predictable picture instead of a guess. It is used every working day across the office.
The hard part
Forecasting. Predicting what the coming weeks look like meant combining standing orders, one-off orders, delivery patterns and production yield cycles into a single forward view, then keeping it accurate as the week changes underneath it.
Product names and figures shown in the demo have been changed.