The story
The customer
Mann Lake makes and distributes beekeeping supplies, for commercial beekeeping businesses and for hobbyists. It has six locations in the United States, a network of distributors and an eCommerce business, so it ships both web orders and distributor orders, and moves stock between its own sites.
The challenge
Mann Lake didn't have weights and dimensions for its products. Without them it couldn't quote accurate shipping to eCommerce customers or distributors, and that showed up in several places:
- Overpaying for shipping
- Abandoned online carts when the shipping quote was too high
- Transfer orders between locations planned without knowing what would fit on each truck
- A planned demand-planning (MRP) system that needed weights and dimensions to work
For years the project to capture the data wasn't prioritised: the catalog has over 10,000 products, and the job looked difficult, slow and costly. Mann Lake expected months of work: the fallback was to bring in 10 to 20 temporary staff until the job was done. Weighing items with scales was straightforward; capturing dimensions accurately and quickly was the hard part.
The setup
Mann Lake heard about mobile dimensioning in an email from RF-SMART, a NetSuite warehouse software company, and saw the M2 in a demo at RF-SMART's office. It bought two QBOID handheld dimensioners. What the case study, the video and the photo above show:
- Devices
- Two M2 Mobile Dimensioners
- App
- Item & Parcel app To confirm
- Captured per product
- Dimensions, weight and photos
- Weight
- From scales; whether a scale was paired with the M2 or weights were entered separately To confirm
- Where the data goes
- Into NetSuite, photos included, for shipping quotes, picking and transfer planning. Whether through RF-SMART, the device push or QBOID Cloud To confirm
Results and how they were measured
Even after buying the devices, Mann Lake expected the project to take a couple of months. Its CFO, Shana Rowlette, reports that the team captured weights and dimensions for 10,000+ products in under two weeks, and 90% of them in the first week, with images of the items.
The figures are Mann Lake's own: the number of products captured and the time it took. The case study describes the effects that followed without putting numbers on them:
- Shipping rates quoted at checkout became accurate, and abandoned carts fell
- Mann Lake pays shipping based on real dimensional data
- Transfer orders between locations are planned and loaded more efficiently
- Mann Lake describes labour savings (no temporary staff), lower shipping costs and sales it no longer loses
The product count and the time come from Mann Lake's published case study and the CFO's video. In the video she also puts the savings at "easily half a million dollars" (no added staff, lower shipping costs, sales no longer lost); the figure stays off this page until Mann Lake approves it. Use of all of it here is Pending approval
Ongoing use
The M2 devices stayed in daily use after the catalog project:
- Receiving
- New products are measured and weighed as they arrive, and existing products are checked again every day, for example when a case count changes, so the catalog stays complete.
- Quality assurance
- Product photos are used to check items before they are stocked, and pickers compare the item in the bin with its photo.
- Shipping
- Outgoing shipments are measured, so freight is charged on the right dimensions.