Our fulfilment operations have remained a vital part of our business and services offered over the last 18-months, despite the growing demand for digital materials. We have recently updated our stock app, utilising our internal digital expertise to reflect the needs of our clients to manage their physical and digital assets simultaneously.
In this blog, we give an overview of the main changes that we have implemented to streamline the ordering process and improve the user experience for our clients.
Where does the new stock app fit in with our existing fulfilment services?
As a somewhat uncommon addition for an agency like ours, we provide a value-added fulfilment service for our clients either as an additional or standalone service. This is an area in which we have a wealth of knowledge, gained through over 20 years of experience so far and a current output of around half a million items sent out per year. We offer bespoke ordering, online management, and storage services for our clients’ physical products along with worldwide daily distribution from 1 to 100 addresses – all of which can be managed via our user-friendly stock app.
With the move to a more digital market, a great benefit of our new stock app is that it now allows our clients to manage both digital and physical products in the same place – the user is able to access a digital library of PDFs and within the same system can also order physical copies of marketing materials.
The app also incorporates the strict regulation and approval requirements for medical products. Digital items can be set with permissions to automatically be withdrawn from the platform as soon as their end ‘Veeva’ date is reached, whereas stock items can be set with regulations such as maximum order quantities, only being viewable to certain teams within an organisation and can even prompt for a reprint when stock is running low.
A new and improved stock app
While our stock app is not a completely new service, we wanted to create something that suited the needs of our clients to manage both digital and physical assets using only one system.
There are several features that have been introduced which will improve the overall experience and ease of ordering for our clients, for example their order history data and address book are now available to them through whichever device they log on with. We’ve also made the log in process simpler, with less information to remember and more information built into the operating system.
The app has been created using a leading technology platform, so this makes this a very reliable and secure system overall. We decided to move our ordering platform from iOS to a web-based system that could be used on any device. This makes the whole system more accessible to our customers, who may use various devices in the working day, and avoids any iOS updates interfering with our service.
We’ve also introduced features that will minimise the risk of user errors within the ordering process: the system now displays larger images to reduce the likelihood of ordering the incorrect item and there is now an option to add PDF briefing documents to each product too. The ordering process is much more efficient with customers able to take greater control of what they are ordering, reducing the risk of any miscommunication during the process.
Setting up new users now requires less administration for both the customers and IGNIFI, speeding up the process overall. So far, we have found that we are receiving fewer queries to deal with the functionality of our ordering system. Orders can now be accessed via a simple weblink without the need to download software and the potential for IT issues that come with that.
The technical side of building our own stock app
By building our new stock app in-house, we were able to target it to meet our internal needs but also our clients’ needs and user behaviour. Our IT Manager Wayne Nixon, who was responsible for building the app, gave us a quick overview of the main changes that have been implemented:
“To allow the app to be used on all devices with an internet connection, rather than being exclusive to the iPad, we decided to migrate our iOS application to an online Azure system. One of the advantages of the Azure web app is that if there are any modifications to the backend code or the design it can be pushed out very quickly to the end user, whereas in the past the user had to update manually to reflect the changes.
With using best of breed technologies such as the Azure platform, the security enhancements and GDPR compliance are a lot easier to adhere to, we also use enhanced security tools and reporting so we can monitor and are alerted to risks or updates that we need to apply. The system is also set so if there is a surge in activity the app will automatically scale up so as not to have any latency for the end user. These changes have ultimately created a better and more secure user experience.”
If you’re looking for an agency to provide storage and distribution of your sales materials, manage your inventory and help to streamline the process, get in touch today to discuss our marketing and fulfilment service.
Or for more content including updates on our services, digital healthcare, marketing best practice and much more, visit our blog.
Posted by Susan Conlon
Fulfilment Manager
