The challenge
Charles Trent Ltd is among the UK's top three automotive salvage and recycling companies, with a thriving online parts business.
The firm's new £4million distribution center at nearby Holton Heath is the first stage of an ambitious five-year growth plan - predicted to boost turnover to a £1/4 billion. However, Charles Trent's labor intensive and unreliable, paper picking process wasn't geared up for such expansion and the operations team quickly realized an architecturally robust, highly flexible and easily configurable WMS was required to power the company forward.
The solution
The company's Distribution & Operations Manager, Matthew Groves, had previous and positive experience of advanced, cloud-based SnapFulfil WMS and had no hesitation in recommending the software and system to the board.
Returns on wrong products and parts going missing were a particular problem at the old Poole HQ warehouse. This was compounded by human error in what was an onerous manual process and there was no validation of picking.
Subsequently, the storage and distribution transition from the old warehouse and processes to the new, digitally-driven distribution centre has been pretty seamless.
The company is now fully operational from the new DC, which has capacity for 60,000 'green' recycled products, ranging from used components such as engines and gearboxes to small parts and interiors.
The benefits
Charles Trent acknowledges it has the very latest in warehouse management technology to help realize plans and is confident its distribution center is the only one of its kind in the country. It puts the firm at the forefront of the industry and is more like an Amazon approach, where you can source a particular part online and then have it delivered next day.
Company resource is also much more streamlined, efficient and productive with Holton Heath now in operation 18 hours daily, across two shifts – for a massive increase in order processing capacity, but without the need for additional resource.
SnapFulfil is renowned for being high tech in terms of available functionality, but still very easy to pick up and use for new operatives, with the eight new staff at Holton Health quickly up-to-speed and taking advantage of task grouping for optimum picking and sequencing.
The future
Charles Trent is confident that with SnapFulfil's help 110,000 green parts will be processed in and out of the Holton Heath facility during 2021, increasing to 170,000 in 2022. SnapFulfil scales with the business to meet all of its ongoing and future demands. The kitting functionality especially can support rapid scaling of fulfillment processes, as well as quick succession of multiple site facility rollouts.
