Premier Healthcare, a leading multidisciplinary health and hygiene supplier based in Newcastle, embarked on a transformative journey when they first partnered with ZYNK, a Sage implementor. This collaboration marked the beginning of an evolution that led them to connect with ShipTheory, to revolutionise their shipping processes.
Premier Healthcare Interview
Shiptheory and Zynk chatted to Shannon and Jason on their journey so far automating their business.
Q: Give us a bit of background on Premier Healthcare
Premier Healthcare is based in Newcastle and we deal with a variety of sectors, anything from funeral directors to schools, it's a really broad brush of services that help people.
We do physiotherapy services and products such as chairs and beds. We supply dietary and a range of medical products to various places including the NHS. Then we provide cleaning and hygiene products, to local businesses.
Things have changed massively since we first started, we've expanded our operations and the team. Recently creating a more advanced website and of course, being introduced to Zynk and Shiptheory. They really allowed us to get our platforms to cooperate with each other and automate manual labour.
Q: What carriers and sales channels do you guys use?
We sell on Magento 2 which is integrated through Sage and was sorted through Zynks implementation. As for carriers we use Parcelforce for the main 99% of the items, then we also have a delivery driver who delivers around our local areas. Shiptheory allows all these platforms to talk to each.
Q: What were you guys doing before Zynk and Shiptheory?
I can’t imagine life without using them. So, back in the day, everything was done manually. We’d have Sage and Magneto 2 work Separately. The first task was going through all these orders manually which were coming in. Then manually processing them which was duplicating labor-intensive work.
In terms of Shipping, it literally used to be a pen and paper on a piece of card. Eventually becoming a bit more technical moving to Parcelforce however manually inputting addresses.
We were at the stage where it had gotten too much and we were banging our heads against the wall. It was such a long process we just really needed to find a solution. After a bit of digging and reading around we found Zynk and it really just snowballed in the right direction from there.
Q: What's the greatest impact having these solutions all talking to each other had?
It's been great. It's really been able to minimise the time we spend on shipping and order fulfilment. The mistake minimisation is a massive one, none of the solutions will have a grammatical error which we humans were making day in and day out. Now we just have to rely on the customer inputting their details correctly.
If we start thinking about how much time we’ve saved, we used to be doing around 1 minute per order and then doing 30 parcels a day. That's 30 minutes just sorting labels out. That doesn’t even take into account the time saving creating the customer accounts, making sure the pricing is correct and adding all the money up. That would take at least 5 minutes per order and that's if you're quick.
Q: What's the biggest difference you’ve seen having these solutions in place?
I think just seeing the amount of time freed up people to do other tasks. It has meant we haven't had to put another bum on a seat and cover the amount of extra business which has come in that's been a massive key saving. We all do little bits here and there and we get involved with every part of the business especially now we are expanding so rapidly. I think we’ll see a massive impact on these solutions if the website keeps expanding and being the main source of revenue.
Our website has been such a big hit, people love that they are able to see all our products and our prices whenever they want. We still get the occasional customers ringing but the majority is through the website now. People can explore products they didn't even know we had.
Q: Why did you choose to integrate Shiptheory with sage rather than going straight to your website?
It was mainly down to many of our orders being processed offline too and sage allowed us to keep track of both ends in one integration. All our orders can now go from Magento and Sage and then straight to Shiptheory with the power of automation it keeps the process so simple.
Q: Would you recommend Shiptheory and Zynk together?
Honestly, since day one, the supports been amazing on both ends, we've never had an issue where things have gone on for a prolonged period of time, or where i’ve struggled to get information. Things went so smoothly transfering to Shiptheory, we were going to use another Shipping solution and we spent around a year trying to integrate our platforms with them , then we hit a point where we realised we couldn’t use them because they didn't have the functionality we needed. So after a bit of analysis we found Shiptheory and its just been amazing, just what we needed.