Optimised order-fulfilment for online micro-businesses post Covid-19

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Whilst Coronavirus has had a massively negative impact on large parts of the economy, it has also driven huge growth in other areas. One such area is that of Internet Mail Order where Lockdown increased UK mail-order parcel volumes by 26% virtually overnight. Much of that growth was driven by micro-sellers who were uniquely able to adapt and continue to trade when larger businesses couldn't. At the same time, thousands of new, small online selling businesses were formed, often by people working from home and looking to replace income lost to the Pandemic. In just one month (May 2020), eBay, reported that a staggering 50,000 new small, independent retailers, joined their site in the UK alone.For the last few years, we have been developing computer hardware/software systems and business processes which are designed to improve the efficiency and accuracy of order picking and packing tasks in distribution (particularly multi-channel e-commerce) businesses.The concept of our innovation is to take the distribution industry picking and packing best-practices which we have developed, and package them in such a way as to be able to deliver their benefits to micro-sellers who have emerged/grown through the Covid Pandemic whilst completely removing their inherent implementation and management complexities.Not all of the processes we have developed are new, but what characterises them is that exclusively, they are all currently only commercially available as part of large, very expensive warehousing management systems which are out of reach of SMEs and Micro-businesses.This project focuses on making our proven systems which enable these processes, available in the form of an off-the-shelf hardware and software package, The solution will be modular and totally scalable in terms of function and capacity and easily installed and maintained by even the smallest of online selling businesses enabling them to achieve results in Key Performance Indicators which are currently enjoyed only by large, resource-rich businesses employing highly expensive bespoke systems. These KPIs include:* Order fulfilment times / costs* Picking errors and resulting returns rates* Customer disputes and resulting refund/reship rates* On-time dispatch & delivery, value-added and resulting customer satisfaction and repeat business metrics* Improved flexibility allowing fragmented and efficient product storage location which in-turn reduce cost and environmental impact