Case study
Freedom unlocked its inventory, and every store became a fulfilment centre.
- Sector
- Furniture and homewares
- Region
- Australia and New Zealand
- Partner
- Nagarro
Five fulfilment centres became sixty two, and cancellations fell from 14% to 1-2%.
Established in 1981, Freedom is one of Australia’s most iconic furniture and homeware retailers. What started as a single store selling outdoor and pine furniture is now an established brand with over 62 retail locations, selling sofas, beds, curtains, cushions and more online and in stores across Australia and New Zealand.
Legacy systems were hurting customer experience and brand loyalty
Freedom’s legacy order management and e-commerce systems needed to evolve with growing customer and business demands. As a true omnichannel retailer, Freedom was (and still is) growing fast. With growth came challenges, including:
- Fulfillment costs eroding margins
- Split shipments and delivery costs eating up profits
- High order cancellation rates, by stores unable to fulfil
- Lower-than-ideal customer satisfaction
- Poor inventory visibility
- Frustrated customers
“Customer satisfaction is extremely important to Freedom. At the end of the day, we needed the ability to free inventory and allow customers across Australia to purchase inventory from anywhere. Another key goal was to create a much more efficient picking and packing process for our stores.”
Freedom needed inventory visibility across all their locations, and a better way to manage order sourcing and omnichannel order management processes. “[Our previous setup] was rudimentary and did not allow the flexibility that was required of an organization of our size,” noted Joshua.
A complete digital overhaul to future-proof the business
Freedom partnered with Fluent Commerce and Nagarro to support their digital transformation. They were undergoing a significant overhaul from “stone age to modern,” according to Joshua. This included a new website, a brand refresh and fulfillment process modernization.
The goal was to lay the foundation for a future-proof architecture, using Fluent Order Management to provide:
- Inventory visibility and omnichannel fulfillment processes to support home delivery from all stores
- Enhanced pick and pack dispatch efficiency which reduced cancellation rates
- The ability to support both home delivery and pickup on a single order
- Sourcing logic to fit their unique needs, limiting the distance an order is sent based on its value and on how fragile the item is
Best of all, the business team can review and update the logic. Without having to get developers involved. This saves them both time and resources.
“Fluent Order Management’s agile fulfillment logic allows us to be very flexible when the business or the customer demands it. Control is probably the biggest word I can use. Fluent Order Management has allowed us to control our fulfillment operations more deeply.”
Nagarro also extended Fluent Order Management to support Freedom’s unique escalation process needs, including manual order reassignment to different locations if needed, which reduced refunds.
“An OMS is one of the single most important tools. You can have the best website, but if you can’t get inventory right, it’s useless. If you have 100 units but can only sell 10, what’s the point? Marketing spend gets wasted when your inventory is off.”
Results, three years on
“Fluent Order Management enables us to be agile, changing safety stock buffers for active and discontinued items with ease. This saw our order cancellation rates drop dramatically to 1-2%, a remarkable improvement from the previous rate of 14%,” according to Rich.
Freedom Australia’s commitment to improving its customers’ experiences have not gone unnoticed. In 2023, they were finalists for both a Power Retail All Stars award as well as 3 Australia Post Online Retail Industry awards.
Over the last three years, Freedom has been able to scale with ease: cancellations down 85%, stock accessibility up tenfold, fulfillment centers up from 5 to 62, and home delivery for homewares grown from 55% to 65%.
Delivered with Nagarro, Freedom’s implementation partner.
What’s next
The team at Nagarro is working with Freedom to integrate Fluent Order Management with Shippit, a carrier solution, so they can further optimize their packaging such as more tailored dimensions of parcels. This flexibility around parcel dimensions will decrease shipping costs further. Plus, support the team’s unwavering commitment to become a more sustainable business.
In the future, customers can also look forward to “on demand” orders where they get to select date and time slots for their deliveries, using Fluent Store. Fluent Store will enable store staff to prioritize picking and packing of orders based on the fulfillment type, so that they can support this experience.
They also have plans to get granular on their split shipment logic, splitting orders based on order value.
For more information on how Fluent Order Management can improve your fulfillment operations, schedule a demo today.
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