How Urban Company Achieved 8X Growth in 27 Months with Unicommerce’s Warehouse Management Solution!
About The Brand
The mission of the company is to offer quality home services that have never been done before. Moreover, it is serving customers across India, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sydney, and Singapore.
Coming over to their operations, Urban Company provides a platform to experienced professionals. These professionals then go through in-depth training programs before listing their services on the platform. Furthermore, Urban Company also sells standard kits to these professionals in order to bring uniformity in the customers’ experience. But as the demand for their services increased, it became difficult for them to curate the kits and keep track of their inventory.
Let’s have a look at how Unicommerce empowered the brand!
Challenges Faced By Urban Company
- As Urban Company curates kits, from multiple SKUs, for the professionals (beauticians, technicians, sofa cleaners, etc.) it became difficult for them to manage the Bundle of Materials (BOM) manually due to the large volume.
- While it was difficult to manage a pile of SKUs in the warehouse, the brand was facing issues in keeping the sanity check of the inventory as per the expiry dates.
- Moreover, the brand also used some of the items to give intensive training and demo sessions, but with the absence of a system, they were unable to keep up with the accounting of the items used in these demo and training sessions, leading to error-prone accounting reports.
- The brand was also facing compliance issues during the Purchase Order (PO) approval process.
Solutions Offered By Unicommerce
- BOM kitting feature: Unicommerce enabled Urban Company to design various kits by making BOM while providing a comprehensive GRN workflow to run robust quality checks by processing Sale Orders mapped against the Purchase Orders. Additionally, the centralized backend of Unicommerce enabled Urban Company to allocate orders state-wise while setting some facility allocation rules.
- Agile expiry management:Unicommerce allowed the brand to scan and trace the SKUs (item level traceability) of kits using an integrated barcode system. With the tightly integrated scanner system, the brand was also able to implement stock rotation methods, including FIFO & FEFO using Unicommerce. Moreover, they also started doing de-kitting (in which they re-shelf the items of the products) to minimize inventory aging.
- Robust accounting of items used for internal consumption: As mentioned above, Urban Company uses some of the products for internal consumption (training and demo). In order to accumulate the products, a new gatepass consumption was developed with 0 tax to 10 Lakh+ materials using a single interface. This not only saved the brand from manual discrepancies but also enabled them to maintain accurate accounting records.
- PO approval process: Unicommerce integrated Urban Company’s backend with a third-party integration while enabling them to implement a comprehensive Purchase Order (PO) approval workflow. During the process, the approval was raised through this third-party integration, which was then sent to the company’s managers for further approval, while seamlessly integrating this workflow within the Unicommerce application. This automatic dissemination allowed them to maintain a certain level of the hierarchy, minimizing compliance issues.
- Picklist management: Striving to save on resources during the outbound process when the product was being picked for shipping, Unicommerce enabled the brand to assign the boxes to each shipment as per its weight and volume. This accurate division of shipments enabled them to save Rs. ½ on every order.
- Reports & Dashboards: With the robust dashboard of Unicommerce, Urban Company was able to create an inventory aging report in order to minimize the dead stock. Some of the essential fields that they use for the purpose, include Item Type Name, Item Type SKU Code, Facility, etc. They also used reports for de-kitting, for which Unicommerce provided the fields such as De-Kitting date, BOM PO, etc. Moreover, Unicommerce also enabled the brand to generate gatepass and sale order data for all facilities in one go.
Impact on the Business
Possessing cutting-edge automation capabilities of warehouse management, Unicommerce has been a constant support to Urban Company. The strong yet easy-to-use interface of the software offered kitting and de-kitting features through which they were able to scale their sales volume, demonstrating 8X growth in 27 months.
Right from enabling item-level traceability using a tightly integrated barcode system, to generating data of multiple facilities in a single go, Urban Company was able to manage 9 warehouses and 60+ city inventory stores using Unicommerce’s Warehouse Management System. While it maintained a catalog count of 1.5k+ items and a live inventory count of 1.6M+ products, the real-time management of operations enabled them to dispatch 50k+ orders per month.
- Ensured 50K+ dispatches per month
- Managed a live inventory count of 1.6M+ products
- Enabled state-wise allocation across 52 warehouses
