Fresh Mediterranean Foods is a wholesale distributor of fresh baked goods and fresh made packaged convenience goods.
They utilize small, local providers for the products they distribute. Fresh Med has helped these small businesses sell thousands of their product per month.
Because of their size, these businesses didn’t have the infrastructure for automated ways of Fresh Med reporting the orders to them leading to the person in charge of accounting being overwhelmed quite frequently, production line errors, and invoicing errors and delays.
Purrly Digital built an automation solution that helped Fresh Med keep these providers as partners and helped their businesses in the process.
Background
Because the providers that Fresh Med orders from are small and local; Fresh Med tries to do what they can to help them introduce efficiencies in handling Fresh Med’s number of orders.
Purrly Digital built an automation tool that these vendors utilize that goes through every order for a specific delivery date and makes a spreadsheet that, by SKU, details how many of that SKU need to be made for that day, how many orders that SKU appears in, and the order numbers. This helps the vendors plan their production lines as well as ingredient ordering and prep.
Additionally we’ve worked with some of their vendors to build out custom spreadsheets that can be imported directly into their accounting systems to prevent them from having to hand-enter each order.
We’ve actually built this twice for Fresh Med due to the changing nature of their business and the vendor’s needs. The latest update includes automatically splitting the delivery summaries into separate files per group of Fresh Med customers due to labeling requirements.
Original Launch Date: May 2017
Revamp Launch Date: July 2019
Plugins This Solution Built Off Of:
Technical:
Vendors are considered a “shipping class” in WooCommerce. Using the Advanced Notifications plugin each shipping class is attached to a notification setup that emails the vendor with each order.
Maje’s solution provided a mapping from shipping class -> advanced notification plus some other options.
On the original build we actually placed the configuration directly inside the shipping classes screen but due to limited space for the number of options needed that screen became harder to use and add new vendors. Not every vendor utilizes delivery summaries for individual reasons (usually order volume related).
Solution
This document helps Fresh Med’s providers make their production lines and prep more efficient.
Custom settings screen for the ability to manage items without needing code changes
