Belinda runs BakeryByBelinda, a business that has several locations throughout London. It is well known for its sourdough sandwiches and pastries.
Belinda started to get a lot of emails and phone calls from customers asking for the potential to place a large order for a future day. Her team started to manage this process manually, requiring a lot of interaction, back-and-forth with customers and chasing payments. They then manually planned the orders each day at each location and had to arrange for couriers to deliver.
It led to lots of issues. Staff started to forget to tell the bakery about certain orders as some were by phone, others by email. Some days, when they had lots of orders, they would get mixed up and sent to the wrong customers. There needed to be a system or process to scale taking large orders in advance, and it became a burden rather than a scalable opportunity.
Enter Slerp. The platform enabled BakeryByBelinda to start to take orders and payments directly from their website. Each of her locations had slightly different menus, and each location could choose how far in advance they needed to prepare the orders. For example, Shoreditch could take orders every day as long as the orders were in by 1pm the day before. Whereas Canary Wharf only did orders Monday to Friday and needed two days advance notice due to their rostering. Each location could even set its delivery area. Every site could be configured to exactly what the business needed.
With the ordering and payments solved, the next component was tackling the production planning. Slerp Composer automatically imports all pre-orders and automatically generates production summaries. This collates all the orders for a location, summarising exactly what needs to be produced that day for all orders. In addition to this, Slerp Composer automatically generates packing slips and order stickers with allergen information for every order, so it is crystal clear what needs to be packed per order, to avoid mix-ups.
BakeryByBelinda also started using Slerp Composer to add in orders for their own stores which were currently mapped out in Excel. Rather than provide the bakers with just the orders from customers who ordered online, they thought, why not also add to the system what is required at each store each day? This enabled the business with a consolidated view of exactly what needed to be produced in one central system, regardless of whether it was an online order or stock for the shop.
With the orders prepared and packed efficiently at every location, the next step was ensuring the appropriate courier vehicles were booked and assigned per online order. The Slerp platform does this automatically and has real humans tracking every single order, whilst also providing tracking updates to the customer so they know exactly where their order is.
The Slerp ordering platform, combined with Composer provides Belinda and her team an error-free solution that can scale, and allow them to focus on other areas of their business.