Artex is a name that has become synonymous with home improvements and the company, which distributes some of the UK’s best known construction brands from a logistics hub in Nottingham, has just selected Indigo Software’s iWMS with voice enabled picking for its warehouse management software.
Artex is a highly data driven business and Indigo iWMS will be integrated with SAP, the company’s existing ERP solution, to provide real-time management information on logistics operations.
Part of the Saint-Gobain group, Artex’s vision is to create a competitive distribution network with the highest levels of customer service. The company has seen significantly increased demand for its products as a result of the recent boom in DIY activity during the Covid-19 lockdowns.
Artex provides a vast array of builder’s merchants, decorating centres and DIY stores up and down the country with a tailor-made product offering to suit their individual needs. This includes offering flexible, multi-drop distribution and delivery services, which allow customers to order the exact products and quantities they need starting from as little as a half a pallet of mixed products. Artex also offers 24-hour turnaround express delivery services for parcels of select products weighing up to 25kg, which are delivered according to a timed booking slot.
Offering such a high degree of flexibility adds complexity to warehouse operations and could result in increased logistics costs. To avoid this and realise other key benefits, the company turned to Indigo for a best of breed warehouse management system (WMS) capable of relieving the administrative burden on warehousing teams and enabling its logistics operation to deliver more product more quickly, and with increased accuracy and flexibility.
Two of the deciding factors in selecting Indigo iWMS were the software’s highly intuitive user experience – especially for new WMS system users – and Indigo’s strong track record of completing seamless implementations, with minimal disruption to normal business operations. Indigo will be fully integrated with SAP for the seamless exchange of customer data and incoming sales orders with pick and dispatch processes. This will include extracting real-time feeds from SAP and pushing ‘confirmation of completion’ data back, once the end to end logistics process is complete.
Kelvin Phipps, Systems and Process Development Manager at Artex says, “After a careful review of all the available solutions, we believe Indigo Software’s iWMS software offers the correct fit for our future business. It will be an enabler for us to reach new heights, with the right balance of system features, software complexity, seamless implementation methodology and cost.”
He adds, “We intend to run our warehouse operations with Indigo’s iWMS for many years so selecting the technology partner with the right system was very important to us. We see Indigo as a software partner that shares our company values, priorities and objectives and look forward to a long and successful working relationship.”
