FareShare is a UK-wide charity fighting hunger and food waste. They redistribute good food that would otherwise go to waste, to more than 4,600 frontline charities and community groups that support vulnerable people in over 320 towns and cities.
FareShare are growing the amount of food they distribute year on year and have ambitious plans for the future, but their legacy system was making this growth difficult.
The specifics of their operations meant that it made no sense for FareShare to purchase and customise an off-the-shelf solution and so they decided to have a product built by Future Processing from scratch.
Future Processing created a bespoke solution for the sourcing and management of goods in and goods out of FareShare warehouses.
The newly created cloud-based application has been designed specifically to save time and boost efficiency in the warehouses and support the management of the national redistribution network whilst maintaining control of food handling and traceability – something which is extremely important in a food-regulated business.
The new application is much more user friendly, more intuitive and quicker to use than the legacy application. This means no long training is required which is crucial to the overall efficiency of the warehouses since new workers and volunteers join the charity regularly. Great attention has been paid to the user experience and speed of data entry, for example extensive use of UI features such as autocomplete fields help decrease product input time on key processes by up to 1/3 when compared to the old system.
The solution also includes a complete analytics and reporting solution, so users will now also be able to get key performance metrics and reports easily across multiple warehouses.
Another benefit of the system is its scalability which is possible thanks to the use of Amazon Web Services – a cloud-based platform providing on-demand computing and storage.
The system we are working on with Future Processing has got an amazing, intuitive user interface. Some of the processing that’s been put into it is much better than the way we have and it currently reflects the way we want to work – rather than us working around the system, the system works for us. And there’s lots of bells and whistles in terms of what I’ve seen and what it’s going to do for us, so we’re really excited to have it.
Rachel Ledwith, London Development Manager at FareShare London
The project was managed on behalf of FareShare by Quantiv Limited, a UK-based software design consultancy.
One of the things we have valued about working with Future Processing is that we got the cost benefits of working with a nearshore provider, but we also had the benefits of a well-established team. You came in with known set technologies, you knew what you were doing, knew how your processes worked, how your management worked and how to run an agile process. This all meant we hit the ground running.
We started to get useable stuff out very quickly and things like the quality has been good. In terms of recommending Future Processing as a supplier, I would definitely say yes because so far we’ve been very happy with what has come out of the process and what’s come out of the team.
Steve Baker, Director at Quantiv