Who is Sidekix?
Sidekix has existed for almost 25 years and in that time grew into a serious company with 140 employees, production, a contact center, an IT department and its own warehouse. The name hits the role exactly: "We are the sidekick of our customers. We also call our customers our heroes," says Bas Raaijmakers, marketer at Sidekix.
The pillars are direct mail, marketing fulfillment, e-fulfillment and the contact center. Campaigns with a physical layer, such as letters, prize packages or a complete web flow with questions afterwards, are run by Sidekix from A to Z.
An example from the conversation: "If only it were that easy," says Jochum about the TV campaign of a telecom customer. First pay, then connect, then safety checks, and only then may the TV go out the door. "Any company can ship a television. But a flow like that, with all the checks, you have to set that up." The same goes for television shows with viewers in the studio: the invitation on the mat, the files that go back afterwards and the scanners at the entrance, so that the right person sits in the right seat. That is all Sidekix.
The challenge: the nightly mountain
The Sidekix warehouse works like an ordinary webshop fulfiller, with one important difference: the orders do not come in spread across the day, but in a single export. "On day A 500,000 emails are sent and on day B we have an export of 120,000 to 150,000 parcels," says Jochum. That mountain arrives at twelve o'clock at night and has to be processed before five in the morning.
"Every WMS has a big problem with that," he says. "And that was true for Ceyenne at the start too: it could handle a hundred thousand parcels a day, but overlooked that they all came in at once, at twelve o'clock at night."
Before Sidekix started on the WMS, there was no WMS at all, by the way. There was an ERP system with some inventory management, which "did not keep very tight track" of where pallets were, how much was on them and when something had arrived. Paper, lists, and guessing the best-before dates of products.
The approach: jumping in at the deep end together
Six years ago Sidekix chose Ceyenne WMS from Diract, after an extensive analysis by its own IT department of which party could best handle the challenge. "At that time we were a big customer for Diract too," says Jochum. "We both jumped in at the deep end."
What followed was a project team of Diract and the Sidekix IT department that scaled the nightly export to what a working day can handle. Trade-offs were made that a standard webshop never has to think about: are pick jobs from the day before counted again or released? How heavy may the data run in one go? "It's not quite that simple," says Jochum. "There are a great many ifs and buts behind why one thing has to be processed this way and another differently."
That was solved by "continuing to talk well, continuing to listen to each other and both thinking in terms of solutions". Now the inbound and the outbound, the complete process from receipt to shipment, run through Ceyenne WMS. And about the warehouse itself: it is set up for growth with wider aisles and reach trucks, every product is on a unique location and every pallet carries a number with which the entire journey can be followed. Everything arrives in bulk, but leaves per piece. Machines make a box for each product that fits the product exactly. "We don't ship air."
The result
- The nightly mountain is no longer a problem. "It runs, it works," says Jochum.
- The peak has become plannable. November through the end of January, when volume rises to one and a half and sometimes two times the monthly workload, they face it with "a lot of confidence". Campaigns that first ran outside the WMS have been brought in.
- No guesswork in the warehouse: everything scanned, everything traced, from pallet to product. Paper is no longer involved.
- The collaboration has become a steady rhythm: weekly meetings, someone from Diract at Sidekix every week, online or in person.
- Sidekix ideas have become standard in the system. "Many ideas we once suggested have also become standard," says Jochum. Every other Diract user benefits as a result. Together they phase out the original custom work as much as possible, because custom work requires different maintenance and extra testing with every update.
How Sidekix views the collaboration
The lines between Diract and Sidekix are short: weekly meetings, regularly someone on site, and the consultant who knows the system inside out. Where Sidekix is known as a company that "first says yes and then gets going", their marketer Bas recognizes a kindred character in Diract: "A party that doesn't just say no either."
And how does Jochum describe Diract in one sentence? "Diract is a growing organization that is hands-on and human, that grows along with the company it works for."
Meet Sidekix at ICT en Logistiek
For those who want to hear this from someone on the floor: on Tuesday 3 November, during ICT en Logistiek at the Jaarbeurs in Utrecht, Jochum takes the speaker's seat as a guest of Diract at 10:00.
There is one thing he wants to give visitors: with a challenge that lies further from standard use, you still arrive at an end result together. "If it isn't there, it can be made."
His advice to other users? By working with a different system you tend to "look very critically at your organization, at your processes". That has brought Sidekix a great deal, and he wants to share it.
