Past the best before date: Four Square’s new ordering system

Four Square is part of Foodstuffs, New Zealand’s biggest grocery distributor and one of the country’s largest business organisations. When needing to order products from Foodstuffs’ distribution centre, Four Square’s portable data terminal (PDT) system relied on difficult-to-repair 25-year-old technology and dial-up modems that were prone to failure. Because of this, orders sometimes included errors and stores were not able to review these orders to make corrections.

A new ordering system was on the shopping list.

The new system, built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), allows Four Square store owners to review and edit their orders before transmission, and delegate the process to their staff who can improve their skill set and work input in the process.

Working with Datacom, Four Square were able to deploy and provide training on how to use the platform too stores in just one month, often in 30 minute, over-the-phone sessions thanks to the system’s intuitive setup.

Four Square’s former error rate of more than 75 per cent on submitted orders has now decreased to less than 10 per cent, helping the business to save substantial time in remedial investigations.

Being able to have visibility of cost, pricing and promotional data has also allowed stores to improve their ability to order the right amount of product at the right time, with one store reporting an increase in weekly turnover of NZ$2,000.