Hi there, its been a while since I made a post I hope you are all well, there is a bit to download, I’ll try to be brief!
Jessica – for those of you following the story of my niece Jess and her national donor appeal I am delighted to report the following…Jess had a heart and liver transplant on the 1st of September, its been kept out of the media to avoid attention and allow for recuperation, things tracked reasonably well for a few weeks then 3 weeks ago Jess had a major setback due to excess fluid which pushed her into full heart failure, luckily it was as a procedure was about to begin to correct a stent in the liver that wasn’t behaving and we had the top Heart Surgeon in NZ attending, they quickly cracked open her chest again, which had been slow healing 🙁 and the surgeon manually massaged the heart for 15 minutes until she able to be put back on full life support. Long story short it was the second scariest part of the journey however I am delighted to announce her recovery since then has been miraculous. She has regained a lot of her strength and muscle coordination (the anesthetics wreak havoc here) and from a painful, fully assisted few steps 3 weeks ago with a trachea machine breathing for her and being fed intravenously Jess is now breathing by herself, eating, walking and most importantly smiling and joking. Go Jess! What a journey.
New SCS portal – This finally went live a couple of months ago and we have been testing it with a few clients. The first cut is an upgrade of the old site, much faster, new modern look and vastly improved security and role management framework. In two weeks we will be releasing a self registration screen for you and you can decide what users in your organisation will have access to what. In this release we will also have a stunning stock management report we have built for you, it calculates and predicts your months of cover by SKU based on different historical periods, for years I have been surprised that most of our clients don’t have this level of reporting so with help from our South Island partner Kris (Sorted Logistics) and some internal sessions we have built a brilliant solution for you, this report will also calculate your stock turns by SKU and there is a desire to evolve this into a powerful purchasing and stock management tool that will allow you to build forecasts, plug in promotions, do look alike comparisons for new products and build full cost models.
SCS Portal road map – We will be delivering the ability to allow you to generate and automatically email yourself key reports, we have an advanced KPI engine in development that will allow you to run sophisticated KPI reporting on our performance (currently the data to do this is available in the old site but building the reports is manual – so this will be automated)
SCS mobile app – our new portal site is mobile friendly so you will have access to everything we do for you on your phone, one of the first releases we are looking to do in the new year is to modify the sales order module to allow you use our app to raise an order and send it to a nominated email address(s).
Glass Elephant – is a new division we have launched with a partner (Simon Phillips) 3 months ago that helps businesses dramatically grow their on-line channels. Last year Bricks and Mortar grew 1% whilst on-line grew 9% and that trend is continuing for the foreseeable future. I have always had a deep interest in B2C and SCS is now one of the largest B2C 3PLs in NZ, a lot of our customers want to build out capability to leverage this channel but they don’t understand it that well in terms of how to drive traffic, influencers, cutting edge Facebook Advertising methods, Klaviyo customer nurturing email workflows, Pixel tracking, Pull Marketing etc… so we have now have this amazing new capability to help them. GE is specifically targeted at SME. For Enterprise clients we continue to work with and/or refer Greg Randall who is a powerhouse for large ecom businesses.
We are referring to Glass Elephant as an Integrated ecommerce growth engineering firm. It has two aspects where we can work for you (provide a range of digital services e.g. Digital Strategy, Facebook/Instagram ads, email marketing, web design etc…) or with you on an advisory, retainer/revenue share basis where we managed a range of defined tasks. Part of our offering is that we have developed epic capability in design, customer services/chat/email, facebook analysis and email marketing in the Philippines currently a team of 4. There needs to be a good fit for both parties so we have a selection process we have developed and methodology/framework we have developed with a creative genius based in New York, Jack Butcher who has built stunning campaigns for 8 figure companies like Ferrari. The methodology is called Magnitude and when I get time I look forward to sharing it with you…we will have a site up and running in a couple of weeks. We’re working influencers like Art and Matilda, an All Black and Sera Lilly. One of our first clients is an apparel company they are an end-to-end SCS/Glass elephant customer, this month will deliver an 80k top line for them, double what this business was doing just a few months ago. Another exciting customer is a rev share partnership we are currently launching with a new independent make-up brand called Colour Junkie, billboard on Gorge Bolt Memorial (next week), very edgy, authentic and current a key part of our strategy is to show how digital marketing can drive foot traffic into bricks and mortar stores which I am excited about as building out this capability will deliver enormous value to most our SCS B2B clients who would like to develop this capability to add value to their customers – keep and eye out for our billboard and stay tuned for more updates.
Wellness Programme – This is going GREAT, something I have been wanting to do for ages, its taken us nearly a year to develop the first cut and the feedback already has been overwhelmingly positive, Graeme will be releasing a blog post update on this very soon.
SCS awards night – SCS turns 17 this year and one of our staff suggested we hold an awards night so that’s what we are doing! This inaugural event takes place on Saturday the 10th of November we have awards for things like the best packer, leader, most popular, most accurate picker etc…its is jammed packed with cultural events (staff have been practicing evening and weekends to showcase their culture), competitions and spot prizes we have 211 staff and partners attending and excitement levels are through the roof, we’ll post photos and videos of our big night as a blog.
PaT development – PaT continues to evolve, we have had huge advances around speed and uptime as it is now professionally hosted, in the last few months we have rolled out the Bulletin Board (its like a facebook for business), the H&S module has had LTI (Loss Time Injury) and MTI (Medical Time Injury) added, the audit and compliance module is finally in beta testing and we have released our first version of workflow – Ports of Auckland are now using this feature manage all of their credit and PO requests in their Nexus division. PaT has evolved in to a digital workshop for managing operational excellence the ability to create recurring tasks and have non-compliance escalate remains one its most powerful features and of course our clients all have high training compliance now as it proves itself as a powerful LMS (Learning Management System) which removes a lot of headaches and insanity.
Xmas trading – A lot of customers are saying trade is a bit slow at the moment, our bet back in Sept was that our silly season would fire off late this year being 1st of November and this seems to be the case although we have adjusted our prediction to mid Nov as only some of our clients are firing a full pace currently. In our 17 years of trade this is the second time this has happened which is interesting.
I hope you are finding these posts interesting, we have spread the responsibility to other members of our team. I wish you all an epic xmas trading season, safe travels for your holidays and thank you for being part of our family – you rock!
Brad and the team at SCS
