The founders of Irish e-commerce company MicksGarage.com are launching a new software product they have developed to improve warehouse efficiency.
Iaran Crean, CEO of MicksGarage, said he and his brother Mick believe the new WaveOMS company has global potential. He said the software generally doubles the capacity of warehouses that fulfill e-commerce orders.
“We believe there is a very significant global opportunity for the technology we are developing,” said Crean Sunday independent. “And we think it could be as successful as MicksGarage.com and even more successful.”
He thinks it can help smaller retailers compete. “It’s good for margin, it’s good from a competitive perspective because ultimately Amazon is building a huge warehouse on our doorstep near the airport, so it’s on anyone who’s picking and packing and shipping orders to make sure they’re doing it do so efficiently as possible.”
They recently appointed Barry Thornton as the designated COO/Managing Director of MickGarage.com. The goal is for WaveOMS to reach 20 customers this year. Existing customers include Tipperary Crystal and 10 more are being implemented.
Crean said WaveOMS grew out of increased sales during the pandemic lockdowns when sales doubled.
“We have an in-house development team and my brother, MicksGarage co-founder and CTO, said there had to be a better way to fulfill e-commerce orders in a very high-volume space without incurring costs have to.
“We took a very, very critical view of the existing processes that we have designed over many years.”
Rather than picking individual orders or small batches of orders, the system they developed breaks down orders into individual items and reassembles them before packing.
“We implemented it and found that despite doubling our sales, we could easily achieve this level of business with the amount of warehouse resources we have.”
The power of the software spread through word of mouth.
“A lot of Irish retailers came to MicksGarage and said we now have a significant e-commerce operation but we have to do 24 hour shifts, we have to process orders and we have to throw bodies at it because we have an IT stack , which is not suitable for picking large quantities.
“We will have 15 customers practically within 10 months. So we obviously hit a line. We have some great clients like Bookstation, McCabes Pharmacy, Art and Hobby and Tipperary Crystal and we are currently implementing 10 more.”
He said software is attractive to businesses in two ways.
“For anyone responsible for e-commerce, it turns warehouse from a bottleneck into a growth engine. For the finance director, they love it because their resources are actually pick packing (in the warehouse) at a very efficient level. With our system, you usually double the capacity of the warehouse with departing employees.”
Crean said they will dig deeper into the strategy later this year.
“At the moment it was funded internally. We only got our website up a few weeks ago, but that was because we were too busy signing up and implementing clients to look at our marketing efforts, which is a good complaint.
“This year we set ourselves the goal of reaching 20 customers, and we will clearly exceed that. Once we have implemented these 10, which is expected to be done by early June, we will sit down and strategically review our options to grow the business. How do we see it going to bring the software further?
“We are actively looking for clients in the UK to run our first remote implementation of this and given that this is a SaaS business and given that e-commerce is the number one medium these days that We believe people are buying is a global opportunity to do so.”
https://www.independent.ie/business/irish/micksgarage-owners-in-tech-drive-41413597.html MicksGarage owner in Tech Drive
