“We’ve saved at least 6 hours a day in labour. It’s sensational actually. And on top of that, it’s reduced the errors.”

Ken

Customer Spotlight

The Blue Space

Discover How Blue Space saved time with MachShip

The Blue Space is an Australian online retailer that provides renovation products for creating dream spaces throughout your home. They offer a curated range of designer pieces from leading Australian brands and are proudly Australian-owned and operated with their warehouse located in Sydney, with a second warehouse opening in Melbourne early 2023.

The company stands out from its competitors by offering a range of online and offline tools and services to help customers design, plan, and source the products they need. They sell complete toilets, baths, vanities, basins, taps, showers, bathroom accessories, and more.

Platforms they use

The Blue Space uses a range of online tools and platforms to manage its logistics and deliver an amazing experience for its customers. As part of their tech stack, they use the inventory management software Unleashed.

Unleashed is a popular tool for manufacturers, wholesalers and eCommerce retailers. The MachShip integration with Unleashed allows customers to eliminate clunky manual processes and seamlessly streamline shipping. Unleashed allows The Blue Space to create a better experience for its customers (with a dedicated online ordering portal). MachShip will automatically update other systems with crucial information like “order status” — saving the team a lot of time and hassle.

Why The Blue Space chose MachShip

The Blue Space was looking for a solution to streamline its processes, cut expenses and reduce human error. One of the things that initially drew them to MachShip was the ability to integrate with Unleashed — as well as their eCommerce platform, Shopify. Their previous solution was unable to do this, which meant a team member would need to go in and manually mark every order as “complete” or “fulfilled”, chewing up man hours and very open to human error.

They also needed to rely on individual carriers to provide them with reporting and weren’t able to quickly pull reports for different regions and carriers. This meant they were unable to get the data they needed to make clear business decisions around saving money on shipping costs. Ultimately this meant paying more for shipping, reduced profit margins, and less capital to deploy in other areas of the business.

MachShip and The Blue Space results

After moving away from the other platform that was limiting their capabilities, The Blue Space team began seeing a fantastic ROI from MachShip.

As MachShip was able to integrate with Unleashed and Shopify they immediately began saving significant time on tasks they were doing manually. Ken Poole, The Blue Space National Logistics Manager says these integrations alone have been extremely valuable.

“It could integrate with two of our platforms, whereas our previous solution would only integrate with Shopify. MachShip integrates with our backend ERP system, Unleashed. This has meant we’ve saved at least 6 hours a day in labour. It’s sensational actually. And on top of that, it’s reduced the errors. Because obviously being a manual process it’s very open to errors. So not only have we saved a head count but the accuracy has improved as well.”

On top of these significant cost savings, The Blue Space team were able to uncover areas in their freight management that could be improved. This allowed them to make high-level business decisions that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible.

“Rather than having to rely on our carriers providing a quarterly dispersion report or DIFOT report — I can now produce those myself out of MachShip. The level of detail is great — right down to the states, zones and regions that the freight is going to. I can now produce my own dispersion report by carriers, for a set period of time.”

This report alone has saved The Blue Space profit by providing them with decision making data, Ken explained how:

“For example, we’ve now made the decision to turn off some zones because it’s become cost-prohibitive to send there — and that was on the back of data. Being able to produce these reports directly out of MachShip and instantly look at that is excellent.”

The MachShip experience

Ken also speaks very highly of the experience he has had dealing with the MachShip team.

“The team, the backend, and the support have been really good. Any changes or requests that we put through have been actioned really quickly. As with any new process, there can be teething problems at the beginning and their ability to walk us through them has been fantastic.”