Guthries Group is one of Scotland's largest independent distributors of Health, Safety and Facilities supplies. Their business is driven by a customer-centric approach which helps to save people’s time and money and hence gives them a complete peace of mind.

Guthrie Group has been able to equip its customers with Workwear, Personal Protective Equipment, Cleaning Products, Catering Supplies, and Packaging and is on the Scotland Excel framework.

The group is accredited to BRC Global
Standard in Storage & Distribution (AA) and is
an ISO 9001:2015 organization.

Industry in Focus

Global Preventive Healthcare Market is expected to touch $345 Billion by 2029. The Health and Safety industry provides safety equipment to various kinds of buyers across the world present in hospitals, the hospitality industry, large international companies, the armed forces, airports, construction sites, colleges & universities, etc. The items provided include PPE kits, safety helmets, safety packaging, etc. All of this would protect the users from the risk of accidents or adverse effects on health.

Initial Challenges faced by Guthrie Group:

For ease of understanding, we can categorize the challenges into three major components:

Buyer specific

Guthrie wished to provide a seamless ordering system to their 500+ client base which includes their regular B2B as well as B2C clients. Guthrie also facilitates a unique credit system which they wished to link with the ordering portal so that their customers have complete control with ease in ordering. The challenge was to integrate the ordering process with stock availability as well as supplement it with an allocated credit limit per customer.

In the Warehouse

The warehouse team at Guthrie manages over 13,000 SKUs in their facility. In the absence of an integrated system which can help them track the location of items, identifying the stock as per the order and back-ordering the stock with vendors was a nightmare that limited their abilities to proactively manage the stock levels.

Vendor specific

In the absence of real-time data on the depleting stock levels, sales trends and not having timely orders exerted huge pressure on Guthrie’s vendors to supply the required stock optimally at the right time. Overall, Guthrie needed a standardized system hich can integrate all its standalone software and processes to become one so that the flow of information is harmonious and the database of such information will help them analyse the growth patterns. A solution which was scalable, agile and efficient for the future.

The solution was obvious

A Cloud-based Integrated Management System

What exactly is an Integrated Management System?

Well, to answer that, an integrated Management system (IMS) brings together all aspects of an organisation’s systems, processes, and standards and combines them into one intelligent cloud computing system. This combination would allow you to streamline your business’s management, save time and increase efficiency by addressing all elements of the management system as a whole. For, the Guthries group, the IMS was designed and developed using microservices architecture and AWS’s Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS)” -

Let’s Quickly run through the benefits of both concepts:

Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)

Amazon EKS is a managed service that helps to run Kubernetes on AWS more smoothly. Kubernetes is an open-source system that allows organizations to deploy and manage containerized applications like Platform as a Service (PaaS). With the help of Kubernetes, you can easily use your applications for containerization with AWS. All applications that run on Kubernetes are compatible with Amazon EKS.

Benefits of EKS

• You can easily run your Kubernetes applications on both Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and AWS Fartage with the help of Amazon EKS.
• By using Amazon EKS, you can take advantage of all the performance, scalability, and reliability of AWS infrastructure.
• You can also integrate your Kubernetes applications with AWS networking and security services such as application load balancers for load distributions and AWS Virtual Private Cloud support for pod networking.

Microservices

Microservices use an architectural and organizational approach to software development where the software contains small independent services that communicate with well-defined APIs. You can easily develop and scale your applications with the help of microservices which will help you to innovate and add scale in future.

Benefits of Microservices

It allows you to easily deploy your services, hence making it easier for you to implement new ideas and take a step back to reflect on the ideas that didn’t work.

With the help of Microservices architecture, your team can the best tool to solve a specific problem. As a result, they can choose the best tool for each job.

Microservices would help an organization of small teams to take control of its services. They are encouraged to work more independently and quickly. As a result, the development time of a particular app shortens.

The Impact

There was a huge impact on various performance parameters through the cloudbased IMS, developed and deployed using AWSEKS and microservices architecture, in the words of Cynthia Guthrie:

Performance Enhancement

The business’s management processes got improved. With streamlined procedures and continual improvements, the Guthries group has benefited from increased productivity.

Streamlined Management: We have taken advantage of aligned objectives and processes and tackled them at the same time for streamlined efficiency.

Faster Implementation: With just one system, we have developed and implemented a new management system in far less time, which allowed us to start reaping the rewards of greater efficiency more quickly.

Co-operation and Coordination: We have successfully coordinated our efforts towards continual improvement and used our multiple Standards to support our company’s growth.

Cost-effective solution: With the help of shared tasks and processes, there was a positive effect on the cost of implementing and maintaining our system. By conducting just one audit and one management review on their entire value chain – from clients to vendors and our staff, we have saved both time and money.

Consistency: With the help of aligned systems and shared processes, we have made our procedures more logical and coherent. Basically, more defined objectives for success.

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