Achieving 5X Business Growth
Asendia is a joint venture between the French and Swiss national postal services, respectively La Poste and Swiss Post. It has dominated the fulfillment and mail solutions markets over the past years in more than 15 countries.
When Asendia wanted to transition from its legacy systems to new-age technology, it needed a solution that could fulfill all its requirements. This case study presents how Asendia adopted modern technology to achieve 5X business growth and to explore opportunities in cross border eCommerce logistics.
Background
Asendia is present in Asia Oceania with offices across Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia. The mail giant offers a dense network of logistics and delivery services through innovative and digitally sound options and aims to make cross border eCommerce accessible and reliable for businesses around the world.
Challenges
Asendia needed a full-suite and agile system that could accommodate its large and complex network of customers, and respond to a rapidly changing environment. As the company was operating across regions globally – Asia, Europe, and USA – managing operations on the legacy system was not possible. Below are some of the primary challenges it encountered:
1. Old School WMS
Asendia operated through an outdated Warehouse Management System and hence lacked integrations with new-age eCommerce marketplaces. As most of Asendia’s customers were selling on these channels, having these integrations was crucial for the company.
2. Manual Processes and SOPs
Since Asendia operated on legacy systems that were built many years ago, most of its processes were manual. This caused friction in maintaining a centralized flow of operations. They realized that in order to project their plan of facilitating cross-border eCommerce they needed an advanced, unified system.
3. Lack of Seamless Order Processing
As Asendia worked with many third party players, it was imperative for them to manage multiple order processing flows simultaneously. But due to the lack of technology, they were unable to distribute orders seamlessly across systems.
Implementation
After identifying Asendia’s pain points and essential details of their business structure, we developed a complete solution to integrate Asendia’s existing internal tools and partner EDI through our Warehouse Management System- Anchanto WMS. The workshops we conducted to acquaint Asendia’s teams with our systems allowed us to gather new learnings on their practical needs and implement new workflows into our system.
The solution was shortly rolled out at Asendia’s Singapore Fulfillment Centre and the company’s 1st customer was onboarded. The process was being closely monitored, and additional operational flows were defined to ensure a seamless transition.
We also delivered few additional customizations, some of which are still in process:
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Enabled new cross-border flows with faster support functions, enhanced APIs and consistent workflows to help Asendia support their customers selling on Shopee across borders.
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Enhanced our integrations with webstore builders such as Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce with custom requirements.
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Added new customer integrations that require specific API configurations and carrier selection.
Outcome
Leveraging Anchanto’s system turned out to be a highly successful decision for Asendia. It also helped them achieve scalability and digitized their operations.
a. New Automated Flows
Now Asendia uses Anchanto WMS to manage a systematic fulfillment for domestic and cross-border businesses across electronics, supplements, and health and beauty segments. Asendia Singapore now manages fulfillment and shipping operations via both postal and express methods for its customer base consisting of enterprise customers.
b. Transition to Modern System
It successfully replaced multiple legacy systems with a single powerful and centralized system. It has further simplified the process of onboarding new eCommerce customers and the company can now manage their fulfillment through the platform’s ready integrations with marketplaces.
c. Simplified Onboarding of Customers
Asendia’s team went on to move 8 customers every month from the legacy system to the Anchanto platform. In approximately 6 months, all customers migrated to Anchanto platform. The legacy system was then finally decommissioned.
d. Increased Order Volume
They processed over 700,000 orders in the first 6 months after a successful transition to the platform. During the peak season, they processed over 60,000 orders in a single day, which is around 5 times their previous capacity.
Conclusion
Anchanto’s technology provided Asendia the technology to facilitate lightning-fast logistic experiences regardless of order volume or eCommerce channels.
After the initial phase, Asendia and Anchanto extended collaboration for joint business development activities across markets such as Thailand, The United Kingdom, and Australia. Together with Asendia, we developed a joint solution for Australian retailers, sellers and brands for local and international fulfillment.
Asendia also purchased 50 additional licenses of our multichannel eCommerce management system- Anchanto OMS. These customers can use Anchanto OMS and inject orders into Asendia’s fulfillment workflow. We are also working on Asendia’s request for integration with additional marketplaces such as Cdiscount, Fruugo, eBay US, and eBay UK.
