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Mercury: : traveling on orders Datalogic Memor

Mercury, a company, which works in the area of gift article trade, automated the logistics and commercial areas applying K-Logistic and K-Order from Kirio, the software house from Bologna. The result: an efficient company, able to manage its activities in a correct and safe way.

The project’s objective: A winning idea and fast growing business. Mercury was founded seven years ago by four colleagues who decided to import gift articles from Southeast Asia to sell in Italy. The headquarters are in Genoa, as are the warehouse with 4,500 sqm and the showroom. In Shanghai a representative office was opened in 2003. Mercury has a turnover of almost ten million Euros, 14 employees and almost 1,000 active clients all over Italy, while the company recently started its activities also outside of Italy on the European market with good prospects regarding growth. The goods are monitored throughout the cycle: from the selection at the supplier, to their production and the sales. The turning point came when the company changed the distribution system, from wholesale to retail. This brought an immense increase in terms of customers, which had to be followed directly by the company (from 4-5 to 20-25 in every city) and consequently led to a revision of the operative-logistics processes in the company.

How to organise a warehouse: “The warehouse is the heart of our company; the place where we receive the goods and prepare them for shipping. When the warehouse is efficient all the connected activities are lean and can be managed correctly,” confirms Roberto Ponte, General and Commercial Manager at Mercury.The main objective was to reduce manual operations as much as possible, which had grown due to the new type of distribution. Without intervention this would have created congestion as well as a need for an increase in terms of staff.“It was necessary to stay up to date and we decided to trust technology, looking for a partner, who speaks our language,” says Ponte. Kirio, the software house from Bologna, analysed Mercury’s needs in 2008 and suggested to integrate into Microarea’s Mago.Net the two applications K-Logistic and K-Order. “Kirio delivered some precious support. They understood our needs and developed standard solutions, which soon became customised solutions for us,” Ponte adds.

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The Mago.Net management system transfers the purchase order automatically to the warehousemen’s terminals, who, thanks to the instructions given by K-Logistic, know exactly where they can find the requested article (on pallets with respective barcodes) and which procedure to follow regarding its shipping, from the preparation of the pallet to in-house movement. “It’s a computerised warehouse, where the locations and the staff are managed according to their roles. Every operation is registered and processed,” Ponte adds.

The company in your pocket: There are numerous advantages thanks to the use of the two applications. From the logistical point of view the complex management is now more linear and fluid. Previously during stock taking the mismatches were usually between six and seven percent, but are now down to zero.

Mercury: traveling on orders Datalogic MemorFrom K-Order to K-Logistic: for an integrated chainK-Order is a web platform, which automatically and easily manages purchase orders from the sales network. The Mercury agents connect with an access password to K-Order and see the entire picture of the commercial area of their competence (clients’ profiles, statistics regarding capacities and type of purchase etc.). The agents can create proper catalogues dedicated to their clients, but also personalised sales models. They have access to the necessary information to decide which client to visit. Furthermore the integration of K-Order with K-Logistic – the system for warehouse logistics and distribution management – enables the agent to know the availability of a certain goods in the warehouse in real-time and therefore knows what can be offered to a customer. The agent and some selected clients can forward the purchase order from anywhere.

Furthermore considering the distribution logic and the consequent increase in terms of the chains complexity, the staff dedicated to the warehouse remained the same, with five warehousemen. “Three factors are fundamental for us, which are translated into ‘efficiency’: speed, safety and a correct management of the shipping. Kirio enabled us to reach this goal, to be ‘modern’. The market today doesn’t allow us to be evaluating in front of a customer. We have ‘the company in our pocket’. We can receive the necessary information at any time and therefore take the right decisions, without making numerous phone calls to the warehouse and to the administration department, like we had to do in the past,” Ponte concludes. The adaption and the synergy of the logistical and commercial systems also enable us to manage the couriers and to make correct projections of future sales.