Bot Shop Business Systems
If you are a person that likes to know the operations behind businesses, then this will be interesting to you.
We do have our secret sauce we keep to ourselves but have much to share, nevertheless.
A wise lady, whose name I missed, once said that business is all about numbers and systems. I did not really understand it at the time, but it stayed in my memory. She was absolutely right, as I learned that the bigger the business grows, the more important systems and figures become.
There are two crucial things business systems addresses for you, our customer:
Speed and Accuracy.
Speed and accuracy are also of great importance to all internal systems, not just those that effect customers directly. Even those not directly influencing customers do influence customers indirectly in many ways.
In this post I will concentrate on the business processes that do influence customers directly to give you a good idea on what we do to give you a level of service that makes you happy.
Tried & failed and tried & failed some more.
Getting the best software for our needs, the right staff and the right procedures implemented take time and money. A system that is perfect for one industry can easily be a failure for another. Alot of school fees got paid along the way, do overs are time consuming and usually means starting again from scratch.
Get it right and all falls in place perfectly.
This whole blog post is really about our final milestone reached, all the school fees paid off and we are now in total control of our systems.
Processes in place for our customers include:
Procurement
- When new consignments are received, each product is packaged in the correct amounts, most is sold each but components like resistors are sold in packs of 10.
- Next each product pack is barcoded.
- Now the products get counted via barcode scanning.
- The final step is to pack them in their corresponding bin.
(There are some additional steps like spot checks etc. done throughout this process and also, we make sure the supplier sends the correct products.)
This process makes sure that we pack in our warehousing a 100% correct amount of stock to ensure stock level accuracy.
Fulfillment
- All products for all orders for the day is added to a pick list and our picking guy goes and pick all products for all orders. This is also done via barcode scanning of each product. This means they cannot take the wrong product, to little or too much of each product without the system notifying the picker.
- Next the packer will pack all the products that was picked also by barcode scanning each product. If the packer, for example, only pack one instead of two of a product the system will notify the packer.
- Now, once every order is packed there should be nothing of the picked products left at which point, we are certain that packages is correctly packed.
- Finally, each order is packed and double check in the courier bags and send off.
As a final note, any product used internally is going through the procedure to keep our stock 100% accurate.
Support
Our sales and technical support is at the heart of our services. The implementation is world-class.
- We implemented many support channels including calls, email, web forms, live chat and Whatapp.
- Behind the scenes all these channels are integrated into our ticketing system so that we can reply to your queries in the same channel you used and record all the conversations.
- All these conversations are available to you (if you have a profile on the website) directly from your profile page. You can even open, re-open tickets or close the tickets.
Other
Then we have a shipping management system that keeps track of all shipped goods. We have system for returns, repairs and so on in place as well.
With these systems running from March 2024 customers can expect the following:
- Accurate stock levels on the website
- Accurate orders received.
- Fast delivery
- Fast problem handling
- Fast support handling with no support tickets getting lost.
These are just a few of the systems in place that will make your dealings with Bot Shop easier.
And yes, mistakes are still made sometimes but can as a minimum be quickly corrected and measures put in place so that it does not happen again. Will absolute 100% brilliance ever me reached? Many say no but we are not going to stop going for 100% error free service & product:-)