Main issues: The company was a long established distributor of parts for the wood working industry. Up to now all interaction and sales was driven by mobile vans going to the customer sites in the 32 counties of Ireland. This was costly, inefficient and was practically not possible with the pandemic.
Project: The lean start project focussed on getting the owners of the company to focus on getting the existing web presence , which was vey basic, fully ecommerce enabled and to commence the process of finding very practical ways that the business could use lean methodology to interact electronically with their client base.
Outcomes: The company now has a fully functioning ecommerce website and are taking orders and despatching direct online. This has lead to a 20% decrease in administration time taken to deal with phone calls and queries. it also has lead to a 200% decrease in transport costs and is much more environmentally friendly. The company can now trade 24x 7x 365 and has a much wider reach and may well export for the first time.
