When Premier Healthcare first launched in Newcastle, we were a local business with a simple mission: to provide essential healthcare products and services to the community. Over time, we've grown beyond that, expanding our team and reaching a wide range of sectors. From funeral directors to schools. We offer everything from physiotherapy services and specialised chairs and beds to dietary and medical supplies. We've also branched into cleaning and hygiene products for local businesses. Premier Healthcare might have started small, but today, we’re proud to serve a diverse group of customers, including the NHS.

We used to do everything manually. Every order that came through Magento had to be processed and entered into Sage manually. The office team would then send the paperwork to the warehouse, where the same shipping information had to be entered again.

Shipping originally involved a pen, paper and clipboard. Eventually, we moved to the Parcelforce portal, but the warehouse team still spent hours manually entering addresses. As our website and customer base grew, the process became increasingly difficult to manage. We couldn’t encourage more customers to order through the website because every additional online order created more manual work. It was a long process that nobody wanted to do, so we knew we needed to find a solution. After a bit of digging and reading around, we found Zynk, and it just snowballed in the right direction from there.

Many of our orders are processed offline, so using Sage as the central source allows us to keep track of both online and offline orders through one integration. This creates one consistent flow of data into Shiptheory, rather than having separate order information coming from Magento and Sage at the same time. It means all our orders follow the same shipping process and we no longer need to log into multiple portals each day.

Parcelforce handles approximately 99% of our standard parcel shipments. We also have an in-house delivery driver who covers an area approximately 20–30 miles around Newcastle, as well as several different couriers for palletised goods, depending on the size and bulk of each order.

The biggest difference has been the amount of time freed up for the team to focus on other parts of the business, such as talking to customers and supporting our growth. Automation has also meant that we haven’t needed to employ another person to manually process the additional orders coming through the website or generate shipping labels.

The website has been a big success because customers can view our full product range and their bespoke prices whenever they want, rather than needing to call us during business hours. As the website continues to expand and becomes a more significant source of revenue, we expect the benefits of automation will grow too. The business is now set up in a way that makes us excited to scale, rather than worried that we won’t be able to cope with an increase in sales.