Epicurium Warehouse

As a wholesaler and distributor of food products, it is vital for Epicurium to manage their daily warehouse operations as effectively as possible.

Essential to this, both as a legal requirement and in order to offer the best service to their fulfilment customers, is retaining end-to-end traceability of every single item that they ship. Being under strict regulations, Epicurium need to ensure that they are able to pick the correct batches, check the correct batches are being put in those orders and still trace the stock once it has gone out.

With the business quickly taking off, Epicurium decided to implement OrderWise not too long after they founded in late 2009, with the aim to introduce better processes before the everyday running of operations became difficult to control. To find out how OrderWise has helped with this, we spoke to Ben McKechnie, Director of Epicurium, who took the time to tell us how OrderWise has helped the company to both effectively manage their traceability requirements and also streamline their warehouse operations.

With the stock traceability provided by OrderWise offering Epicurium the ability to know that the right products have been shipped, in-turn this has also enabled them to provide better service to their customers too. Ben explained that as they have a full audit trail of all items that they have despatched, when a customer queries their order, all they have to do is track the items they’ve had into the business and use this trail to find out when it was eventually sent.

“There has been several times where a customer has called us up and said “I’ve received my order but I’m missing this item” – we’ve been able to look back through OrderWise, see that the warehouse has checked off the correct batch, so we’re sure it’s gone out. We can then go back to the customer and say “can you just double check what you’ve received?” and sure enough, probably nine times out of ten, they’ll come back and say they’ve found it.”

However, OrderWise hasn’t just helped Epicurium with the accuracy of their despatch process but also the speed of them. By being able to set up walk routes so that pickers move through the warehouse in the most efficient manner, Ben explained that they’ve been able to get their high order volumes out the door in rapid fashion.

“With OrderWise we have pick bays set with the walk routes, which tells the warehouse staff to pick in the correct order so that they’re not going from place to place, instead they’re going in consecutive pick bins. That I would say is crucial because until we introduced that, pickers would be walking from one end of the pick bay to another – so that has really improved the pick speeds.”