Premier Healthcare & Hygiene Ltd, the leading health and hygiene supplier based in Newcastle, can now print their shipping labels and save their tracking information from inside of Sage 50
Visit Premier Healthcare & Hygiene Ltd
Healthcare supplier eliminates manual input making process 50% more efficient.
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 & Hygiene 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. Supplying 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 and customised website all after being introduced to Zynk and Shiptheory. They allowed us to get our platforms to cooperate with each other and seamlessly automate manual labour.
Q: What carriers and sales channels do you use?
We sell on Magento 2, which is integrated through Sage and was implemented with the help of Zynk. As for carriers, we use Parcelforce for the main 99% of the items, then we also have an in-house delivery driver who delivers around our local areas. Shiptheory allows all these platforms to talk to each other, meaning we no longer have to log into multiple portals daily.
Q: What were you guys doing before Zynk and Shiptheory?
Back in the day, everything was done completely manually. We’d have Sage and Magneto 2 work separately with no communication. The first task was going through all these orders manually, which was sorting through the duplicates, and then we would manually process each one, which was duplicating labour-intensive work.
In terms of Shipping, it used to be a pen, paper and clipboard. Eventually, it became a bit more technical, moving to the Parcelforce portal. However, we would still spend hours manually inputting addresses. It was such a long process, which nobody wanted to do, we just really 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.
Q: What's the greatest impact having these solutions all talking to each other had?
It's really been able to minimise the time we spend on boring shipping and order fulfilment. The mistake minimisation is a massive one, none of the solutions will have a grammatical error which we humans are making day in and day out. Now we have to rely on the customer inputting their details correctly.
If we start thinking about how much time we’ve saved, we used to do around 2 minutes per order and then do 30 parcels a day. That's a whole hour 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. It has made us at least 50% more efficient.
Q: What's the biggest difference you’ve seen having these solutions in place?
Seeing the amount of time freed up for people to do other tasks they enjoy, such as talking to customers and scaling the business. The greatest financial saving has been not having to employ someone to do the label generation; Shiptheory does it all with the click of a button. Now, we all take turns to do little bits here and there, and it's not a long, boring task one person is trained to do. I think we’ll see the impact of these solutions if the website keeps expanding and being the main source of revenue; it's set up in a way we are excited to scale, not worried that we won't be able to cope with the increase in sales.
Our website has been such a big hit; people love that they can see all our products and our prices whenever they want. We still get the occasional customers ringing, but most is through the website now. People can explore products they didn't even know we had.
Q: Why did you integrate Shiptheory with Sage rather than going straight to your website?
It was mainly down to many of our orders being processed offline, and Sage allows us to keep track of both ends in one integration. All our orders can now go from Magento and Sage straight to Shiptheory. With the power of automation, it keeps the process so simple.
Q: Would you recommend Shiptheory and ZYNK together?
Since day one, the support has been amazing on both ends; we've never had an issue where things have gone on for a prolonged period or where I’ve struggled to get information. Things went so smoothly onboarding to Shiptheory. We were going to use Shipstation, 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 it's just been amazing, just what we needed.