In the previous weeks blog we have introduced our order processors Michelle and Clo.

When looking though some of our old social media posts this week I found some photos of when we used to walk up to the post office in Huddersfield with the daily Upvc Spares 4 Repairs orders. That seems crazy to think about now, however back then the online side of the business really was small. When I started at the company if the person processing the orders had 10 a day, that really was a good day!

The post office would manually process every order and give a proof of postage, the proof of postage would then be stapled to a physical order copy that lived in a file in the order processing office. All very 1980's!

Over time the volume of orders grew too much for one person to walk up to the post office with, so I then started walking up with a bag of orders to help out.

As time went on we were joined by Darren from the Gardinia Windows side of the business who walked up with a third bag of orders.

At around 4pm the order processing office would look something like this:

Needless to say we got some dirty looks when the queue in the post office looked like this...

Even more so when the business till in the post office wasn't open due to strikes. It was quite award been stood Infront of people who had only one parcel to post with loads of orders, as per the photo below 😅

We could easily be in the post office a good 30-45 mins on busy days.

Eventually the post office said we had enough orders to qualify for a daily collection and the rest is history! Upvc Spares 4 Repairs has just kept growing since then.

How did we process online orders more efficiently?

We become more efficient over time, first creating CSV order profiles that would export orders that met a certain criteria. These could then be uploaded to Royal Mail Dispatch Manager online as a CSV file to automatically generate shipping labels.

Over time this become more complex as we offered customers the choice of various shipping options at the point of purchase.

It was my job to create and manage the shipping table, this grew to be a CSV file that was over 150 lines long. The shipping table would take in to account the products shipping group, weight and destination to generate the correct Royal Mail or TNT shipping label. If multiple products were in the basket, it would look at the product with the highest shipping group and start working though the shipping table from there:

That did become a work of art to make changes to with how complex it got, however it worked really well for us, keeping Spares4Repairs processing orders efficiently over the years.

Eventually we got to the point of processing 100's of orders a day, so the bottle neck was now matching the shipping labels generated on Royal Mail's dispatch manager online to the printed picking sheet.

We knew we had to become more efficient, so our developers integrated the website with Royal Mail's API, this allowed for shipping labels to be generated instantly when the order was processed and embedded as a peel off label on the picking sheet.

The end result is only once piece of paper would ever be printed off and could go though to the warehouse for picking a lot quicker, due to their been no shipping label to match up with the picking sheet.

So that's essentially how we went from processing 10 orders a day, to having the ability to process more 100's ready for picking in less time than it takes to make a brew.

As always do feel free to contact us via the website or send us an email if you think we can help with a Upvc related repair.