(Quick note: If you have come here to learn more about Mercury, the innermost planet of the solar system, or Mercury the chemical element, I will have to disappoint you. This is about Mercury, Boranic’s supply chain solution.)
In the Beginning
Having worked in the fresh produce industry for more than 25 years, we have observed it over and over. Growers want to do what they do best: Grow their produce. Then comes the part that is more of a necessary distraction (dare I say evil?): Keeping track of orders, managing inventory, arranging shipments to customers. That paperwork war.
How is that done? Using a bunch of Excel workbooks and combining it with your accounting software is a good start, but those are not tailored to the problem. So you make the best of it and hope it all works out at the end.
We recognise that you would rather focus on your core business and spend less time with the administrative work. That’s what spawned the idea to develop Mercury. We wanted to offer an all-in-one solution to all sizes of operations, from family businesses to medium and large-scale enterprises. The idea is that you can get on board and manage operations at low entry cost and without needing to install anything on your laptop, PC or mobile devices. A web browser is all that’s required. And yes, you can use your tablet or mobile phone for work when you are out and about.
Priorities
One of the curious types of enquiries that we have gotten over the years was: Printing of shipping labels. It seems like a trivial problem to solve, until you get down to the nitty-gritty: One has to comply with government regulations, at least in Australia when crossing state borders. Customers have specific requirements in terms of what’s on the labels, where things are on the labels and even sizes of fonts. Who can stay on top of that? Or rather: who wants to stay on top of that?
So we embarked on solving that specific problem first. We quickly realised that this requires a number of puzzle pieces to be in place, lest we want to make this a process that is only slightly less arduous than using generic label design tools where one moves around little boxes on the screen with a mouse, then copying and pasting entire label designs, manipulating text elements for the next shipment and hoping that everything is compliant with the customer and the DPI. And of course hoping that one hadn’t misspelled any names or numbers in the process. And then do the whole thing again tomorrow. This is a time-consuming effort that nobody enjoys. One can spend one’s time better than that!
The Plan
A plan was devised on how to build a solution that not only makes the users’ (i.e. your) lives easier, but also — hopefully — be something that is actually fun to work with. Something that we like to work with ourselves. I think we’ve succeeded in that respect, but ultimately you will have to be the judge of that!
There you have it. In the next few days and weeks you will find more posts here about Mercury. Follow us on that journey!