Application to streamline a ordering process for Nike

Cous has built a new web application for Nike to help them streamline the ordering of marketing material from their retailers all around Europe. Because the retailers are located all around Europe the application has been translated to over 6 different languages.

A few times each year Nike has to send out marketing material to be used for a new campaign that their retailers should be using in their stores. The production of these marketing materials is on the go and depends on how much gets ordered.

Before the application this process involved Excel sheets, emails back and fourth and a bunch of phone calls to keep track of what retailer ordered what. This was a very tedious task that took a lot of time and was very error-prone.

The solution to this problem was to build a custom made application that works kind of like an "internal" e-commerce where the retailers can log in to the system and place their orders.

When placing the orders the retailer has the option to order for a single store or multiple stores depending on how the organisation looks like. The retailer can also choose to either let Nike ship the material to each individual store or to ship it to a national office.

Because the retailer has logged in to the application we know a lot about them like their past orders, the shipping details, amount of stores and so on to really streamline the process from the retailers point of view.

The tool from the retailers perspective when ordering material for two stores.

Administration platform to handle all orders

Once all the orders has been placed by retailers the material has to be produced and shipped. To handle this operation an administration platform was created. From here a third party provider can log in and see all of the orders that has been placed.

With this information they know how many packs of marketing material they need to create and also where they should be shipped.

The retailer can follow the process the whole way to see where their pack is right now and also get a notification when the pack has been shipped so they can follow it using a tracking number.

Perfect challenge to solve with custom web applications.

This is a problem that we often see in the wild. An ordering process with retailers or other suppliers without a structure. This is often handled by one person or a small team that has to spend a lot of time keeping track of everything.

Keeping all of these orders in an Excel sheet or just by email and phone is also very error prone. It's easy to miss an update or otherwise make a misstake and send the wrong things to the retailer/supplier.

These problems can easily be solved by letting the retailer/supplier place the order themselves in an application very similar to shopping online. When the orders come in to an application in a structured way there can be an administration platform where the orders can be processed.

This way all of the information is stored in one location that saves a lot of time, headache and often also money.

Do you have an ordering process that isn't working as good as you'd like? Do you spend a lot of time and energy to keep track of the orders and usually see misstakes? Reach out and I'd be happy to have a look at the process and see if we can make it better in a similar way that we did for Nike.