Our new order management system
How we use VisibleLogistics ourselves
We first designed VisibleLogistics for sell-side order management, where a 'seller' would use it to track orders that he ships to his customers. However, when we showed an early version to someone she asked if she could enter a 'purchase order', where she would be the buyer, so she could track products she has ordered from her suppliers.
This question made us realise that our intended simplification of designing for sellers was really just an unnecessary restriction. VisibleLogistics now lets you enter orders acting as any one of buyer, carrier or seller, so you have more flexibility in what you use the system for.
The best part of all this, of course, is that we were about to start using VisibleLogistics ourselves to track things that our development team buys: wine and new computers. This turns out to be really useful in our organisation, because we do not have support staff who handle tasks like buying stuff, so members of the team deal with suppliers directly. This can sometimes be a pain, when a supplier telephones about an order and the person who answers the call does not know anything about it.
Now, with our company VisibleLogistics account, order status notifications are sent to an internal e-mail list, so everyone knows what is on order. Also, if a supplier telephones, it is easy to go to the VisibleLogistics dashboard and find the order in the list of open orders. Even better, when we add a telephone message as a comment on an order, the colleague whose order it is stays in the loop.