How Workhorse helped Brown Bag Crisps reduce time spent on order management by up to 70%

Amidst a sea of junk food, one couple is working to bring things back to basics. Launched by Phil and Viv in the UK more than ten years ago, Brown Bag Crisps is a brand designed to keep snacking simple, wholesome and delicious. Read on to learn more about Brown Bag Crisps — and how Workhorse was able to help them keep their order management workflow as simple as their product.

Brown Bag Crisps: Keeping British snacks wholesome

Brown Bag Crisps is a small family-run business in Shepperton, UK. Operated and founded by Phil and Viv, all of Brown Bag's crisps are handmade and sold locally. In a world where processed foods and "junk snacks" are taken for granted, they're working to provide quality, tasty snacks to their customers. In addition to offering unique local flavours, like Tiger Prawn or Beetroot, Carrot, & Parsnip, Brown Bag also works to provide a sustainable, healthy product. By sourcing its products from farmers, making each batch by hand, and working with local distributors, Brown Bag Crisps is a wonderful example of how a family-run business should run.

Phil and Viv were falling victim to admin exhaustion

As you can imagine, the benefits of Brown Bag pay off in a big way. But after years of growth and success, Phil and Viv found that they were struggling to keep up with admin tasks, orders, invoicing and a constantly evolving marketplace. They could have looked to digitised enterprise tools to streamline their operations, but the price of these tools leaves independent businesses, like Brown Bag, with a Catch-22: plough more money into software you only need elements of or waste time (and therefore money) with disorganised order management. So Phil and Viv kept fighting on, drowning in spreadsheets; fighting to stay on top of everyday tasks like processing orders, running purchasing, tracking stock, and having an overview of their data. Or, at least, that was the case until Phil met Alastair here at Workhorse.

How Workhorse was able to help Brown Bag Crisps get back to basics

Workhorse offers a modular order and inventory management platform, meaning businesses only pay for the features they need. This makes next-level tech accessible to SMBs — without compromising on the power and reliability these businesses need. Here's how Workhorse and Brown Bag Crisps work together:

Building everything around the Workhorse app

The first thing Workhorse helped Brown Bag accomplish was unification. Rather than a bunch of scattered, separate processes, all order management admin was brought under the Workhorse umbrella. Everything is available in real-time, with no duplication or delays. The dashboard in the Workhorse app has been particularly useful to Phil and Viv. With four boxes showing their most critical data, they can get an overview of their current live orders and shipments at a moment's notice.

Integrated shipping calculations

Shipping can be an unexpectedly complicated expense to calculate. Depending on where Brown Bag is shipping from, to, and through who, the shipping cost can vary drastically. Before Workhorse, the Brown Bag team was doing all of these calculations themselves. Now, they have an automated algorithm running in the background. This was developed especially for Brown Bag Crisps by Workhorse, saving the business a massive amount of time doing manual calculations. This is just one example of Workhorse adding value to off-the-shelf workflows; custom-building what a business needs to better serve its customers.

Brown Bag Crisps run dispatch through Workhorse as well

Workhorse also enables Brown Bag Crisps to run dispatch through the Workhorse platform, with custom dispatch notes generated in just a few clicks.Running dispatch notes through Workhorse provides a better experience for Brown Bag plus its distributors, warehouses, and customers, as no one is left in the dark (other than the potatoes!).

Workhorse handles the invoicing for Phil and Viv's business

Before using Workhorse, Brown Bag was handling each of their invoices by hand. That meant duplicating each invoice into Xero, where it was then processed. Again, this is an area where Workhorse was able to save Brown Bag Crisps a substantial amount of time. The Workhorse app now copies all of these invoices into Xero for Brown Bag, reducing errors, saving time, and creating a more seamless invoicing experience.

Wrapping up…

Overall, the partnership between Brown Bag Crisps and Workhorse has been a great one. Together we've managed to nail down the following benefits for Brown Bag, improving the experience for them as well as their customers.

Efficiency

Perhaps the biggest long-term benefit Workhorse has provided Phil and Viv with is efficiency. So many of the tedious, by-hand processes that Brown Bag was doing before are now automated and synchronised between the tools they use. This allows Brown Bag Crisps to scale up even further, handle more orders, provide a more consistent and predictable experience — all while spending less time at their desk.

Visibility

The Workhorse dashboard allows Phil and Viv to quickly get an overview of their operations, orders and products. At a moment's notice, they can see exactly how they're performing and where they currently stand. New data has also been made available to Brown Bag through using the Workhorse app. This will enable them to create a richer experience for their distributors and warehouses and help them achieve greater heights of precision and accuracy.

Control

Finally, Workhorse has put Phil and Viv back in control. Brown Bag's data is no longer caught between multiple locations, managed by a variety of people, with duplications running rampant. Under the Workhorse app, everything is unified, easily managed and available to Brown Bag Crisps at all times.

What now?

Now that Brown Bag Crisps has experienced the benefits of Workhorse for themselves, they're ready to take on even more of what Workhorse has to offer. In particular, Phil and Viv are looking to embrace Workhorse's inventory management features. "[With Workhorse] you not only end up with a product that works for you, but you improve the way you do things… The time it’s taken to produce orders has been reduced by 60-70%.” — Phil Lambe, Brown Bag Crisps