Whole Latte Love is a specialty retailer of all things homemade coffee: from brewing, to filtering, to the beans themselves, it’s truly a one-stop shop.
For a company that did e-commerce before the age of highspeed internet, retiring a home-grown ERP was no small decision. However, a configurable, cloud-based system became a growth necessity, and it chose Acumatica to be its solution. As with many things, the journey was anything but linear, and after its initial shipping software caused a six-week ERP deployment delay, 3G Pacejet Shipping became its pack and ship partner.
While shipping merchandise feels like a very “basic” task, its complexities – both known and unknown – require software striking the right balance between ready-to-use and easy-to-configure. This is what Whole Latte Love found in 3G Pacejet. As the only Fulfilled by Acumatica shipping software, there was immediate confidence in its ability to draw information from, and write back to, the ERP without manual intervention.
Having software communicate automatically is a big weight off of a technology manager, but what about in-warehouse results? Once manually keying in orders and going outside the system to validate addresses became a thing of the past, productivity improved dramatically. With nearly 100% scan-based packing and shipping, throughput improved by almost 30%, the time needed to process complex orders lessened by over 50%, and the team now had the capacity to ship thousands of packages per day.
Supply chain uncertainty is always a given, but the addition of 3G Pacejet found Whole Latte Love spending less time confronting the unwanted kind and more time exploring the exciting variety. With the prior ERP, and even the original shipping software paired with Acumatica, the questions were always about fixing: Will it work today? Is information being written back correctly? Will address and tracking information be accurate? Was a highly customized item packed and shipped correctly?
In a post-implementation world, the Whole Latte Love team is instead asking all about building: How can we capture international demand? Can we make shipping less expensive and more efficient for larger products and orders using more LTL freight carriers? How can we efficiently scale? And 3G Pacejet has already begun providing some answers with its automation of export documents, class-leading LTL network, and ability to add shipping stations with just a table and laptop.
Like with coffee, technology quality is important, but equally important is how it’s handled. For an IT leader, nothing is more frustrating than knowing why a vendor’s software isn’t working but not receiving the needed support to fix it. What made Whole Latte Love’s rapid accomplishments with 3G Pacejet possible was finding that partnership with the 3G Pacejet team. Once the “how do we do this?” questions were quickly addressed, the two teams could approach the “how do we build this?” discussions that make their respective businesses so exciting.
“How many systems are intuitive enough that ‘the IT guy’ can walk down onto the warehouse floor and start packing and shipping boxes, but reliable enough for that same IT guy to feel comfortable leaving at 5:00 on Black Friday? So far, I’ve used one: 3G Pacejet.”
