Biggest customer kept, with digital ordering live on its deadline

The result

Everything Boxed met the deadline and kept its biggest customer. Orders now arrive digitally and invoices go back in the format the customer requires, checked before they are sent.

The operations team can see every order and invoice on one screen, and can answer a customer query about any document in minutes. The same system can take on new customers who want to trade digitally, without starting again.

"Max and his team saved our biggest customer relationship. What could have been a business-ending mandate became our smoothest digital transformation."

James Slater, Managing Director, Everything Boxed

The problem

Everything Boxed supplies more than 1,000 product lines, from linen and bedding to electricals and furniture, to government, councils, student accommodation, leisure and build-to-rent providers. It delivers ad hoc, on a schedule or under service contracts, with its own staff on each delivery. Much of its work comes from large contract customers ordering again and again.

Orders and invoices were handled by email, spreadsheets, phone calls and PDF attachments. Then its biggest customer, a large housing services group, set a fixed deadline: switch to digital ordering and invoicing in its required format, or the relationship ends.

Other providers it spoke to wanted a discovery phase and a specification first, with delivery well past the deadline. Everything Boxed did not have that time.

What we did

We were the whole delivery team, and we started work on day one. The people who learned how Everything Boxed works were the same people who designed and delivered the system.

We delivered the part that had to work first: receive orders digitally, check them, show them to the operations team, produce invoices in the customer's format and send them back. Reporting and extras were left for later releases. Before go-live we tested against the customer's real specifications, with sample orders and invoices, and against failures such as dropped connections and badly formed incoming documents.

The operations team run accounts and deliveries, not software. Their dashboard shows new and flagged orders, invoices waiting and sent, and anything that needs attention, in plain language with the next step spelled out.

For the technical reader:

• Two routes in, one pipeline. Orders arrive over EDI for the customer that mandated it, or over a REST API for future customers. Both are normalised into one internal format, and outbound invoices are formatted for the channel they go to.
• Event-driven processing. Each step (order received, validated, accepted, invoice generated, transmitted) is a persisted event that triggers the next. A slow step does not block the others, invoices queue if the transport is down, and the event log is the audit trail.
• Three layers of validation. Schema checks on every inbound and outbound document; business-rule checks of quantities, prices, product codes and customer references against internal data, with mismatches sent for review; and cross-checks of each invoice against its purchase order before it is transmitted.

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