Who Are They?
JMBullion is a coin dealer. They buy and sell an array of gold, silver, and rare coins. They also provide vault storage of coins. They have become one of the foremost coin dealers found online, offering fair, market-value pricing for the coins they sell as buy from those wanting to trade their coins in for cash.
Ask
JMBullion has experienced great success in their industry. Because of that, they were looking for an upgrade for their inventory management system. They are constantly receiving coins that they purchase from individual sellers. They are also fulfilling countless orders for coins. While in their possession, they wanted the coins to have barcoded containers to serialize the coins and maintain the history of identification of the coins.
The process for putting away as well as pulling coins for orders could get tedious. Their facility is large, made up of many aisles and even more coin bins, including separate vaults. To pull each sales order individually would be too tedious. It would take a long time of walking up and down aisles and take back to the front. The process needed get faster and smoother while maintaining 100% accuracy on labeling coins and sending the right ones to their customers when time came. And what they also really needed was an inventory software that would integrate with their shipping program.
Answer
Flowtrac became the tool for JMBullion’s coin management software. Flowtrac provided the coin labels, the tracking information, and the mobile scanners for the warehouse staff. Because their inventory is coins, which they both buy and sell, their operations needed very specific capabilities. In other words, they needed a custom job. JMBullion had not had any luck yet in finding a company that could customize software to receive new coins, buyback coins, coins for the vault storage, and coins that needed to be further inspected for possible damage.
Flowtrac professionals came onsite to get a physical walk-through of their process. Flowtrac analyzed the process and then developed the software that would fit. The coins are now received quicker and placed on barcoded carts, and then from these carts, are put away by scanning into the appropriate bins.
On the sales order side, Flowtrac created a directed picking module for their mobile devices that would compile all the sales orders into one pick list. All the coins sold are gathered in one swoop through warehouse and taken to the packing station for shipment. Through the customization process, Flowtrac assigned a lead software developer and customer success manager to the project. They met with the JMBullion team weekly. Together, the people involved shared in discussion, planning, and testing of the new features as they went along.
An integration to their shipping application made things even smoother. Even though JMBullion was actively using Flowtrac already, the weekly meetings resulted in more improvements. These upgrades could happen in the background without affecting the software in daily use.
Outcomes
I’ve implemented several WMS throughout my career and Flowtrac has been the easiest, most robust, and most malleable by a long shot.
Thomas Fougerousse
As a result of implement Flowtrac’s solution custom-made for coin processing, JMBullion is saving time a labor costs each time they scan in or out coins. They have been able to maximize space, better manage orders, and track the whole history of a coin, which they can access with the click of a button on the Flowtrac cloud-based system.
This project is not only a success for JMBullion, but for Flowtrac as well. In collaboration with JMBullion, Flowtrac has created the latest coin management software that other gold and silver distributors have since been able to enjoy.