Les Services Système D: from paper and Excel to a WMS
The Bois-des-Filion 3PL ran its inventory on paper and Excel. Four years after Flowtrack, the team and the floor space have grown, and productivity with them.
The Challenge
This logistics provider could not quickly answer the question its customers asked every day: where does my stock stand?
The information existed. It lived on printed purchase orders, manual counting sheets and spreadsheets. Answering meant walking the floor, counting, then calling back.
The cost was not only operational
- Manual processes capped efficiency at every step
- Data entry errors were frequent
- With no visibility to offer, every new customer added administrative load with nothing more to show in return
Our Approach
Digitalize the processes first
GCL used Flowtrack to digitalize every production and distribution process:
- Receiving and put-away
- Picking and shipping
- Real-time inventory tracking
That order is not optional. A customer portal is only worth as much as the data it exposes.
Then open the door to customers
A visibility portal then gave customers direct access to the state of their own stock. The daily question no longer reaches the team: the customer asks the system and gets the answer without a middleman.
The Results
- Visibility portal giving customers direct access to their own stock
- Receiving, put-away, picking and shipping digitalized end to end
- Complete elimination of paper-based processes
- Real-time inventory tracking across production and distribution
- Fewer errors from manual data entry
- Greater capacity to onboard new customers
What this means for you
- A customer portal is only worth as much as the data behind it: you build it after digitalizing the processes, never before.
- For a logistics provider, whatever the customer can look up themselves stops being a load on the team.