Posted 24.03.2022
Companies with multiple bases, whether they be franchises, publicly-run healthcare environments or chains, have an additional challenge to contend with than other single establishments: managing uniform restocking at multiple centres simultaneously.
Thankfully, an easy solution lies in investing in a uniform management solution. This post explains what this type of system is, the benefits of incorporating a solution into your workplace and more.
Sometimes referred to as ‘manpack management’,’ a uniform management system is a product catalogue hosted online and available to specific people within a company to order and reorder certain items required for their role. It’s essentially a one-stop shop for employees located around the country to place an order for the uniform and equipment they require in keeping with their company policy.
Depending on the supplier, uniform management solutions can allow employees to order:
And anything else an employee requires to carry out their day-to-day tasks.
This will vary depending on the parameters set at the top level. For example, your solution may allow any employee to log on to the system and place an order. Or you may put a process in place whereby an employee can request an order but it isn’t submitted until a manager reviews and accepts the request. Your customers can place spending caps and even create reordering of sets of items to reduce time spent ordering.
The best uniform management solutions easily integrate into a myriad of systems, allowing you to set up your system and start running it as soon as possible, with minimal training required. Rather than having to learn multiple new processes, you and your employees only need to learn one.
For example, Evolve Trader’s award-winning software integrates seamlessly with PIM, CRM, ERP and MRP systems such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, Oracle Netsuite, SAP and Sage.
Our team can also work closely with your team and build a custom integration to ensure our uniform management software merges seamlessly into your processes and systems, whatever they are.
One challenge of managing multiple business bases is the lowered visibility of spending. With a uniform management system, you can get information in real-time as well as reports covering specific periods (see point five for more on this), so you have full transparency on spending by branch and at a top-level throughout the year.
Not every business operates between the hours of 9 am-5 pm. Consider bars and restaurants that open their doors later in the day and close them at 11 pm or even later. By running a uniform management solution online, orders requests can be submitted at a time that suits your employees.
You can build team-specific catalogues or product lists so that less time is spent scrolling through products that aren’t relevant to them. This also reduces the chances of someone accidentally ordering something completely irrelevant to their role, resulting in costly and time-consuming returns and refunds.
You could implement a service by which a branch can submit an order in large volumes for ease of delivery (and reduced associated costs), or allow orders to be submitted as and when they are required. Whatever works best for your employees is achievable with the right system.
A uniform management system can do much more than submit orders. When you integrate your new system, you’ll gain access to fantastic data to help you understand where most of the company funds are being spent, understand the seasonality of orders – perhaps there a couple of months in the year where orders increase, you can use this information to ensure you increase your stock during that period, for example – and more.
Your system should also be capable of forecasting potential spending based on historic orders, so you can better plan how much budget to apply in the years to come.
More important than implementing a uniform management system is finding the right one for your business. It’s important to ascertain precisely what you want to gain from your system and understand how you can future-proof your purchase for years to come.
For example, you may be looking at specific targets such as:
Or something else.
At Evolve Trader, we work with B2B suppliers, helping them provide a service to their customers that offers complete visibility across branches, reduce the need for manual interventions through automated technology, and removes any limitations to scaling the business, therefore future-proofing their technology. All with demonstrable results.
If you’re interested in finding out more about our uniform management solution, please get in touch to book a free demo today.
