Office Pantry

The Situation

Office Pantry is a fast-growing scaleup with international expansion aspirations.

Office Pantry delivers fresh fruit, healthy snacks, coffee machines, milk, soft & alcoholic drinks, and more to companies who want to provide their workers with a happy, productive workplace.

Based in Bristol and founded in 2014, Office Pantry has grown from a local company to one with nationwide distribution in the UK and a growing presence in France and Spain.

The Problem

Digital tools that worked well during the start-up phase were causing problems

As a successful scale-up, Office Pantry had outgrown its original logistics software. These tools were still performing, but depended heavily on humans to manage data and relied on the knowledge of key people. This created problems when they went on holiday or were unavailable for other reasons. 

The system was also expensive to maintain and data was difficult to organise. A team of people were needed to process, manage and fulfil orders using a complicated process that relied on manual data entry.

The Task

Office Pantry needed a modern system to organise its logistics operations

To keep growing, Office Pantry needed a new platform which would be more robust, allow the company to continue to scale, and be less vulnerable to a single point of failure. 

After discussing their needs with us over a series of meetings in mid-2023, Office Pantry asked Rocketmakers to design and develop a new platform that would provide the foundation they needed to reach their full potential.

Our Work

Rocketmakers built a new system with three critical third party integrations

The platform built by Rocketmakers was built as a web application with a standard SQL database built using.NET and deployed to Azure. All of these technologies are well-known parts of the Rocketmakers tech stack and were fairly straightforward for the team to put together.

To perform all of the functions needed, however, the platform required three complex third party integrations. These were: Xero (to generate invoices), Cin7 Core (a warehouse inventory management and customer management tool), and Go2Stream (route planning software which mapped out the order of deliveries). 

Each of these integrations needed to talk both to the new platform and to each other, providing a serious challenge for the development team. 

One of the most complex challenges was ensuring the platform and the three third party integrations used the same system for order numbers. Each integration used its own system-specific order numbers, this would make organising data centrally impossible. Because Cin7 Core could only use order numbers it created, and these numbers were fixed and unchangeable, the problem was solved by pushing all orders into Cin7 Core first, and then using its numbers for the three other components.

After extensive research and testing, all three integrations were completed successfully, and the new platform was delivered to Office Pantry in December  2023. 

The Result

Office Pantry new software allows employees to focus on customers

The platform became fully operational in March 2024. 

Now, instead of relying on human staff to act as the bridge between systems, Office Pantry ordering and delivery management processes are now connected digitally.  Employees are free to focus on improving customer experience and fulfilling orders instead of data-entry and paperwork. 

The Impact

Good for operations. Good for the bottom line.

The new platform has transformed how Office Pantry operates as a company, and that efficiency is paying off.

According to Office Pantry, the new platform is currently saving the company an estimated £10,000 in operational costs per month.