Trojan Electronics, which provides multi-channel e-tail sales and fulfilment services, has developed its own warehouse management and enterprise resource planning systems.
Managing director Clive Murphy said: “While off-the-shelf products exist, a year long search in which tens of software houses were contacted and engaged with, didn’t uncover solutions close enough to what we needed. We could have decided to on-board a few of the core products we trialled, further developing the products to suit our rigorous requirements, but that would have entailed a period of considerable expenditure, both in terms of cash and time.”
Trojan needed the ability to provide different stocking requirements on a sku by sku and customer by customer basis. It also needed a way to have a single stock holding database that could control products split over more than one physical location, or provide for products (single European Article Numbers) that have multi-variations. This could be for new or refurbished products, or products with different levels of completeness. Trojan can support all these aspects with its MIS solution, where no other product can.
Also imperative to Trojan is the ease of integration with clients’ platforms and data-sources.
Trojan has three divisions. Its refurbishment unit works with many of the biggest retailers in the UK to handle all manner of consumer goods, including electronics. Allied to this activity, Trojan runs a multichannel ecommerce solutions unit that resells many of these goods on behalf of its customers. Finally, a contract electronic manufacturing unit works with a wide range of companies needing to sub-contract their manufacturing process, especially high complexity, bespoke work. In Spring 2015, the company moved to a purpose built 180,000 sq. ft. facility in Kings Dock, Swansea.
“No business can operate as an island, so on an hourly, daily and weekly basis, we need to access the data that our customers hold, or augment their data with data we’ve produced through the provision of our services. With this in mind, our platform has been developed to provide for flexible but secure data exchange, with the actual data transfers typically being catered by sftp (secure file transfer protocol), use our own in-house servers,” said Murphy.
