Le Glaçon Suisse: an ice plant that opened with its software already running
A new Valais ice plant went live with ordering, pricing, dispatch, delivery tracking and invoicing on day one. Traditional development quoted around 100,000 CHF and 8 to 12 months. It cost 12,000 and took weeks.
التحدي
Most companies work the old way first and digitise afterwards. Le Glaçon Suisse went the other way round, and that was a decision by the founders and their investors before the plant existed.
The usual version was available to them. Someone on the phone taking orders. Routes drawn on a printout each morning. An accountant sitting down once a month with a stack of delivery notes to work out who got what. New customers onboarded by email and spreadsheet.
The obstacle to doing it properly instead was price. A system covering customer ordering, back office, dispatch and a driver app is quoted at roughly 100,000 CHF and 8 to 12 months in the traditional model. For an SME opening its first plant, that is not a line in the budget. That is the budget.
And the product itself gives no room to be late. A bar with an empty freezer on a Friday night does not care how good the water is if the van arrives Monday.
الحل
Ordering
Every customer sees their own catalogue and their own prices, and a repeat order takes three taps at any hour of the day. Signing up is a form: the account, the catalogue and the default pricing are created from it automatically, and the supplier can adjust a price afterwards to reward a good account. The order exists from the moment the customer places it, not from the moment someone in the office types it up.
Pricing rules instead of price lists
Dynamic pricing is something people expect from Uber and rarely get from a distributor. The rules are set once in the back office and hold everywhere after that: in the app, on the invoice, in the reports. Le Glaçon Suisse prices by customer size, because a supermarket, a restaurant and a small distributor do not pay the same. Then by order volume, by urgency, by product category, and per customer or group of customers. Any other rule the business invents can be added.
Routing capped by weight
Ice is heavy and cheap, so the binding limit here is weight, and 8Move will not load a van past what it can carry. Plenty of TMS products count stops only and get caught out by exactly this. Weight is not the only option: a route can be capped by number of orders, by time on the road including stops, or by volume, whichever fits the product. Orders group into runs and the dispatcher works from a live map. Three orders landing at eight in the morning re-plan the route on the spot instead of turning into a phone call between the driver and the office.
Delivery the customer can watch
The customer opens the app and sees where the van is and when it will arrive. A notification goes out a few minutes before it pulls up, so somebody is there to meet it. At the door the driver captures a signature, a photo or a scan, with GPS attached.
Invoicing with no office step
8Move is connected to Bexio and works the same way with other ERPs. The driver marks the delivery done, the invoice is issued, emailed to the customer and posted to accounting. Nobody in the office touches it.
التنفيذ
The plant opened in Saxon, canton of Valais, drawing the same Alpine water that comes off the Valais mountains, in a facility built to current standards rather than one that grew out of a shed over twenty years.
The platform went live alongside it. Ordering, back office, dispatch and delivery all ran from the first delivery day, so the company never accumulated a manual process to migrate away from later.
Built by Trident Software Sàrl in Sion. Everything in the platform is our own code, and Le Glaçon Suisse took the modules the business needed at opening rather than a suite it was supposed to grow into.
النتائج
| المؤشر | قبل | بعد | التحسين |
|---|---|---|---|
| Project cost | ~100,000 CHF | 12,000 CHF | -88% |
| Time to live | 8–12 months | Weeks | -90% |
ماذا يقولون
«A project financially inaccessible for an SME in the traditional model, realized within the operational budget of a small business.»
أين ينطبق هذا أيضًا
None of this is really about ice. Swap the product and the platform stays the same. If a vehicle visits the same customers with something to drop off or something to do, this is the shape of work 8Move is built for.
- Coffee beans and capsules
- Printer and copier servicing
- Coffee machine filter changes
- Vending refills
- Laundry pickup and drop-off
- Medical supplies to clinics
- Routine technician rounds