The tech firm that helped Morrisons establish its food box operation in six days has secured government funding to expand.
Derby-based Orderly – which provides e-commerce platforms and order and inventory management solutions – secured the “five-figure funding” this week as part of an Innovate UK competition open to UK businesses “focused on the emerging or increasing needs of society and industries during and following the Covid-19 pandemic”.
The company has worked with Starbucks on an app for store managers to manage inventory and reorder stock, an order management solution for Nestlé and a business-to-consumer sales solution for McCormick Schwartz.
In the past month, Orderly’s headcount has grown with additional software developers, marketing managers and project managers. It remains on a “major recruitment drive” and expects to double in size by the end of the year.
The funding will “help us to roll out our solutions on an ever greater scale, making them accessible for a wider range of retailers and international grocery stores” said Orderly CEO Peter Evans.
“The Covid-19 crisis has caused major disruption in supply chains but also a chance to reassess how things are done. With that disruption has come the opportunity for major innovation and we have been at the heart of that, especially in the food and beverage industry,” he added.
The Morrisons food box work involved creating a customer-facing website, pick & pack technologies and integrations with couriers, payment processors, customer relationship management systems and enterprise resource planning systems.
“A simple, specialised service for any food and beverage business to create and manage food box orders and deliveries does not currently exist. With this funding, we can accelerate our development of that technology to ensure it is fast to implement at other enterprises. With this, medium and large food and beverage businesses can begin to deliver food boxes,” Evans explained.
Orderly has also developed an NHS validation service which allows businesses to prioritise NHS deliveries.
The firm has switched to remote working during the crisis, which is aiding its talent acquisition effort.
“We’ve found there really is no need to go back to the normal nine-to-five office-based business. This new way of working means we can have developers based in locations right across the UK, rather than within a more defined radius of our HQ. The criteria to work with us is not location, it is talent, application and a desire to make a real difference,” Evans said.
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