Presenting our Warehouse Tech at “Show The Code” by TechTree
Hi, I’m Steve D’Souza — an Engineering Manager here at B&W. Recently, my colleague Chris Guy (Lead Software Engineer) and I presented at Show The Code, an event run by TechTree where companies get to talk about interesting projects they are working on. In this blog post, I’ll give you a high level idea of some of the warehouse technology we demonstrated, discuss how it has saved several hours a day for staff there, and provide a link to the video we did.
TL;DR — there was a guy who spent 3 hours a day in a giant refrigerator counting flower stems manually, and 1.5 hours inputting data into Excel on his train ride home. We wrote an mvp Android app and things got much better. YouTube video available here.
Terminology
First let’s clarify some terminology. “Werehouses” are where werewolves live. “Warehouses” are generally more human-oriented. Tech can make a huge difference to both. I’ve no doubt you could set up various IoT devices in a werehouse. Bloom & Wild, however, is more involved with warehouses.
Stock counting application
Processes in a warehouse are generally manual. As production volume increases, it can start to become a real drain on people. One example we brought up at the event was our site manager, Thomas.
Thomas would spend 3 hours a day in a refrigerated stock room counting our flowers. Then another 3 hours a day counting goods received from the delivery truck. All of this was with pen and paper. Then on his train ride home, he’d spent 1.5 hours inputting all of this into Excel.
(I know what you’re thinking. None of this sounds very wolf-like behaviour. We’re reasonably confident about Thomas.)
Chris was able to spend a few days designing an MVP of an Android app that would scan barcodes, collate the data, and upload it to a Google Sheet. That was 4 days of work. On the back of it, Thomas’s time in the fridge room and receiving goods has halved. And he now gets to rest on his train ride home. He has saved over a hundred hours so far.
Future Warehouse Management System Integration
Chris also discussed an upcoming project where we are integrating with a third party hosted Warehouse Management System. He went over some of the architectural considerations and outlined our current thinking on how to get data out of our system and into theirs.
Finishing Thoughts
One of the points I made during the presentation is that tech can make real differences for real people (and also for real wolves). This is especially true when you work in e-commerce. Everything you build delivers something to someone. An mvp Android app gave Thomas his commuting time back. An API integration with DHL API endpoints resulted in customers receiving Christmas trees at their doorstep. There is a lot that we’re excited about, and we’re grateful to TechTree for giving us the opportunity to present.
Links
Here’s the video:
And of course, we also did this to advertise the fact that we are hiring! We’ve got roles for:
- Ruby developers
- Platform developers
- Test engineers
- Anyone with the name Wolfgang
Check out our careers page for more info.
