Indigo’s WMS helps Tetrosyl achieve 10% throughput increase & £200K annual savings

Indigo, the European warehousing and logistics software provider, has announced that Tetrosyl, the manufacturer and supplier of car products in Europe and oil blender in the UK, has significantly increased sales order dispatch rates and achieved annual cost savings of £200,000, since implementing Indigo's WMS solution.

Founded in the 1950s and now a household name following the launch of 'T-Cut' colour restorer, Tetrosyl ships over £120m of products on 200,000 pallets internationally each year. The company dispatches its entire 5,000 SKU product range from two sites in Bury and operations need to cope with a high degree of seasonality, particularly during colder weather, when demand for winter care products such as screen wash and de-icer peaks.

To improve sales order dispatch rates during busy periods and introduce paperless working, Tetrosyl implemented Indigo's WMS solution. Indigo's software gives Tetrosyl's logistics operation the flexibility to fulfil orders from either the warehouse or straight from the end of the production line, depending on shipment size.

Having the flexibility to complete multi-site dispatch was an important benefit offered by Indigo, because it enables Tetrosyl to increase capacity without the need to recruit large numbers of extra workers. At peak demand periods, over 1,500 pallets are shipped daily, representing a significant cost saving. "If someone places an order of up to a pallet of a product, this comes from the pickface in Greengate. Conversely, if they order 26 pallets, we pick this straight from the factory to minimise handling requirements, allowing us to cope with increased throughput and ship orders on time," says Barry Rennie, Operations Manager at Tetrosyl.

Indigo's WMS was selected following a competitive tender because it could integrate seamlessly with Infor's ERP, providing a high level of out of the box functionality. In addition, Indigo's WMS was straightforward, cost effective and well suited to the specifics of Tetrosyl's seasonal manufacturing and distribution operations.

Tetrosyl's investment in Indigo has made a significant business impact and a return on investment was achieved within 12 months. Savings were seen across the warehouse and as a result of overall improved productivity, Tetrosyl has achieved 10% greater throughput capacity without the need to employ additional resources during busy winter periods. The value of this has been estimated in the region of £202,500 per annum, by enabling the warehouse to increase shipments to 200,000 pallets per year and avoid extra manpower costs. "We never got anywhere near this level of throughput before implementing Indigo, because we didn't have the flexibility to automatically switch dispatch locations without needing to introduce a high level of manual intervention," says Barry Rennie.

In addition to increasing dispatch throughput capacity, Indigo's WMS has helped improve picking speeds and accuracy by providing real time data capture and allowing picked products to be assigned a marshalling location. All products are now scanned and assigned a particular dispatch location, so that when Tetrosyl's loaders require an order, they can go straight to the right location with no time wasted looking for picked orders.

Tetrosyl's warehouse management now has real-time access to detailed productivity data for each warehouse operator, to highlight process inefficiency problems and whether additional training is required. This has helped make warehouse operatives more accountable and they now set their own productivity targets based on highest performance levels achieved, which in turn, has translated into higher productivity levels across the warehouse at Tetrosyl. "Indigo has given us a level of control we never had before. Shift managers can monitor operations at a glance from their offices, giving us the flexibility to remotely assign work allocations and control productivity levels. In this respect it's much more effective than having management continually pace the warehouse floor", says Barry Rennie.