Cutting order-to-dispatch from 38 hours to under 4

Meridian ran a catalogue of 14,000 SKUs across four warehouses on a mix of Tally, a legacy inventory tool and a large number of spreadsheets. Stock figures reconciled only at month end, which meant the sales team routinely sold items that were not physically available.

An order took an average of 38 hours from confirmation to dispatch, most of it spent confirming stock by telephone between warehouses. GST returns took nine working days each month and required three people.

We built a modular ERP covering inventory, procurement, sales and finance, with GST compliance handled natively. Stock became a single live figure across all four warehouses, visible to sales at the moment of quoting.

Procurement moved to a three-way match between purchase order, goods receipt and invoice, which removed the reconciliation work that had previously fallen on the accounts team. Approval chains were made configurable so authority limits could change without a developer.

Delivery ran over 22 weeks in four module waves, starting with inventory because it was the source of most downstream pain. Each wave went live in one warehouse first, ran in parallel for two weeks, then rolled out to the rest.

Master data proved to be the largest task: 14,000 SKUs carried duplicate and inconsistent records across systems. We built a de-duplication tool and worked with Meridian's category managers over five weeks to produce a clean catalogue before migration.

Order-to-dispatch fell from 38 hours to 3.6 hours on average. Stock accuracy, measured against quarterly physical counts, rose from 82 percent to 99.1 percent.

GST return preparation dropped from nine working days to under one, freeing two of the three people previously assigned. Perhaps most significantly, out-of-stock sales fell by 94 percent, which removed the single largest source of customer complaints.