Beaverbrooks Case Study

The background

Beaverbrooks is an award-winning and family-owned jeweller established in 1919 with 70 stores across the UK, providing exceptional quality diamonds, jewellery and watches. Entrusted with making occasions such as engagements, weddings, christenings and birthdays truly special, the business needed a modern, reliable system to replace the existing system that they had outgrown.

Working closely with the team at Beaverbrooks over a period of time, ExPD were able to develop our existing OmniPost program for them – incorporating various bespoke options – and we were then able to roll out the completed project company-wide in just four weeks, helping transform their existing operations.

Challenges and Installation

Beaverbrooks have an estate of seventy stores nationwide, together with a central warehouse, and additionally treat manufacturer repair and service centres as an extension of their business. Ensuring products are where they should be, especially given the very nature of the products being handled, is critical to this business.

The very nature of the business means that expensive and customer personal items are continuously moving to and from stores, their central warehouse and repair centres – knowing where these items are and being able to understand a delivery expectation is vital to deliver the high levels of customer service.

As Beaverbrooks expanded its business over the years it introduced a barcode tracking system which provided end to end tracking, but as technology evolved and the company continued to grow, the existing system urgently needed updating. ExPD was challenged with replicating existing functionality and delivering new features to enhance the service delivered to its business and customers with 99.9% uptime. It needed to be fast and responsive for users, cloud hosted to remove the dependency on local IT infrastructure, but above all simple and intuitive to use.

The tracking system required for items to be ‘barcode tagged’ and logged at store or their central warehouse, along with capturing relevant information about that item. Daily containers are created which serve as the transit ID for each despatch locations items. A store would scan each item into the container, and ship that container to the required destination, capturing the courier consignment number along with the sender, date, items manifest and destination.

When a container is receipted, by scanning the single container barcode, the item list (manifest) is visible and can be verified against the contents – the items now have a new location and will be managed accordingly by the Beaverbrooks team.

The solution

ExPD proposed the use of its mailroom tracking system, OmniPost with Datalogic’s Memor 10 mobile computer. OmniPost is used every day by hundreds of businesses, managed buildings, and Universities – the key benefits to Beaverbrooks include using a proven off the shelf solution, and the agility ExPD provide in terms of moulding the system to meet the exact needs. OmniPost as a cloud hosted solution also means the deployment and delivery of system to each of the stores is ready to go.

In addition to core functionality requirements, the system has been configured to be location specific also, enabling each store user to see all data about their specific parcels only – the admin team at the central warehouse however have full visibility of all packages across all locations. Another key new feature, is the introduction of a language pack, enabling any field label in the system to be renamed with the most meaningful title and not use typical PostRoom terms.

The application provided included access to OmniPost web application at all stores, plus the deployment of an Android APP for mobile scanning at specific locations, e.g., their central warehouse and repair centres.

From the first pilot site, to go live at all stores was achieved in just 4 weeks, a testament to the effort and time put in by Beaverbrooks and ExPD to ensure the requirements were fully understood and recourse was well planned to support the roll out.

The result

The OmniPost AWS Cloud hosted barcode tracking system provides 100% tracking of every item sent and received by each store, with complete audit trail total visibility.

ExPD worked closely with Martin Rogers – Operations at Beaverbrooks to ensure OmniPost provided the functionality and data.

Martin Rogers, said: “We worked closely with the ExPD team to implement OmniPost – due to the pandemic the project took longer than originally planned though ExPD made themselves available throughout and took the time to fully understand our requirements aligned to the OmniPost application. Our main objective was to reduce the costs and dependency on local IT infrastructure while retaining the same functionality as the previous system – we achieved this and added some key new additions.

“It’s been an absolute pleasure working with the team at EXPD and we’re delighted with the new system we have in place. They have welcomed our feedback throughout and nothing has been too much trouble for the whole team involved at ExPD with a special mention to Will Harris, our project manager.”