Booktopia - Driving Seamless Visibility and Efficiency with Mobiledock
Booktopia is Australia’s largest online bookstore, with over 1.8 million books across 150,000 different titles in stock and access to more than 6 million other titles.
Booktopia ships to every corner of Australia and NZ from a distribution center in Sydney and employs over 250 staff.
The Problem
In 2014 Booktopia moved to a 10,000sqm warehouse in Lidcombe and in 2016 increased their space when an adjoining warehouse taking their total floor space to more than 13,500sqm.
Given the constricted access to the dock, all inbound deliveries were sent to the adjoining DC and shuttled back to the primary DC.
The challenges of this included:
- Constricted dock access and space in a multi-tenant industrial warehouse precinct
- No ability to schedule inbound deliveries to the correct warehouse
- Unwanted and early POs
- No ability to label freight automatically upon arrival
- Overtime related to unscheduled inbound deliveries
The Solution
Booktopia deployed Mobiledock to schedule all inbound deliveries directly at the primary site removing the need to shuttle freight from the overflow site.
Following deployment, all inbound deliveries were scheduled with a planned time to access to Booktopia’s dock.
Upon arrival at Booktopia’s dock, driver’s booking confirmation forms are scanned to confirm the arrival time and to automatically generate the freight stickers.
The Results
This solution has driven many benefits for Booktopia including:
- Scheduled deliveries in a constricted multi-tenant DC site
- Eliminated queuing / idling times and demurrage
- Inbound inventory control, only loads with valid POs scheduled
- Freight stickers automatically generated when the POs arrive
- Ability to plan staff and eliminate overtime related to unplanned inbound deliveries
- Supplier performance DIFOT reports
- Increased site security and reduced Chain of Responsibility risk.