Specialty Mix – Australia's Leading Wholesale Supplier of Quality Pet and Animal Feeds Adopts CipherLab's Warehousing Solution to Increase its Inventory Management Efficiency and Accuracy

Founded in 1965 in Melbourne, Specialty Mix is a wholesale supplier of a wide range of pet and animal food, pharmaceuticals, stock feeds, supplements and health care products. It originally specialized in providing the premixes for pig and cattle farmers and continued to expand its business to offering many more product choices. Today, Specialty Mix has over 4000 product lines and is one of the leading distributors of quality pet and animal feeds in Australia.

As business grew, Specialty Mix had to quickly move its inventory to a very large purpose-built warehouse. Also, the increase in orders and widening of its range of products inevitably lead to errors in picking and inventory control. Beyond that, it faced the challenges of the additional cost of freight, loss of product, and a lowering of customer satisfaction. To overcome all those challenges, Specialty Mix asked its long-term partner in ERP system, Opal Logic, to source and implement a warehouse system to integrate with their Jiwa Financials ERP system. CipherLab's partner in Melbourne, ASPluris, was recommended and was chosen as its new warehouse management system, and together with CipherLab's RK25, established a much more accurate stock and order management system.

The RK25 is equipped with three versions of Android's operating system, a 25/28-key numeric keypad, an 802.11 a/b/g/n dual band, and the ruggedness of an IP65 along with a 1.8m drop resistance. The device is perfectly suited for the working environment in a large warehouse. As it's integrated with ASPluris' warehouse management software, the staff simply needs to use the RK25 to scan the barcode and the stock number is automatically put into the system to avoid any picking errors. Also, with Wi-Fi infrastructure installed throughout the warehouse, the RK25's dual-band and fast roaming Wi-Fi transmission allows for inventory status to be updated in real-time for the warehouse management. Moreover, the RK25 can link to the Jiwa ERP system when an order is received and will transmit the necessary information to the Jiwa ERP system to be converted into an invoice, which improves the accuracy of sales and inventory management.

The implementation of the RK25 coupled with ASPluris' warehouse management software and Jiwa's ERP software has been very successful and has had the most immediate effect in the reduction of picking errors and a significant increase in stock control. Stocktaking has since become more accurate and the receiving of stock by warehouse staff has been expedited considerably.

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