Case study · Manufacturing
Crafting memorialssince 1879.
Odlings have been making memorials in Hull for almost a hundred and fifty years. Half of what they make is bespoke: a shape nobody has cut before, in granite quarried on the other side of the world and finished by hand in Yorkshire.
- Client
- Odlings
- Where
- Hull, East Riding of Yorkshire
- Sector
- Manufacturing
- Built with
- Laravel, Python, MySQL
The client
Stone from everywhere,finished by hand in Hull.
Odlings manufacture memorials and headstones of all shapes and sizes, with stone from the four corners of the globe. They do much of the manufacturing themselves, but their supply chain does a lot of the heavy lifting.
Our first engagement with Odlings helped them to gain visibility of their whole supply chain, with an auditing tool that traced everything back to its source to ensure Odlings' customers were getting stone they could trust.
Since then, we have been partnered with Odlings to help turn decades of operational data into powerful, AI-powered tools for the business.
The decision
Build technologythat makes things better.
Duncan Reynolds runs a company older than almost everything around it, but his approach to technology is refreshing and modern. He knows that even the most traditional businesses need good systems to power them, and he has been investing in these systems for a long time.
The supply chain audit is an example of something which Odlings took upon themselves, before legislation ever demanded it, because Duncan wanted to be sure. His auditing tool now travels to quarries and factories all over the globe. It is this type of thinking that sets Odlings apart from its competitors.
Under NDA
Our recent engagement with Duncan has been building an AI-powered solution on decades of their business data, to improve both how the operation runs and what their customers experience.
We are not able to go into what that solution does. It is Odlings' advantage rather than our case study, and out of respect for their privacy it stays with them.
If you are considering something similar, talk to us→How it went
Built for a quarryon the other side of the world.
An audit is straightforward to design for an office in Hull. This one had to be answerable in quarries and factories across several countries, in more than one language, by people seeing it for the first time.
Duncan gave us the time, and drew the lines. He decided what an audit had to cover, what a supplier had to evidence, and what counted as a good enough answer. His colleague Chris walked us through how the sourcing actually works, then flew out to spend time with a supplier while we were building it.
01
Scoped with the people who answer it
Time with Duncan and his team working out what an audit has to ask, and how the same question lands differently in different places. Wording that is unambiguous in Hull is not always unambiguous in a quarry in India, and a question nobody understands produces an answer nobody can rely on.
02
It works without a signal
Audits happen in quarries and factories where there is no connection to depend on. Everything is held on the device and syncs when it can, so a visit is never lost because of the wifi.
03
Findings the supplier can act on
Two kinds of audit - one Odlings carry out on site, one the supplier completes themselves - both sectioned, scored and evidenced question by question. Suppliers see what came back and can respond to it, and a completed audit issues a certificate.
What we built
An audit trail,and a conversation.
One audit, from the invitation to the certificate: sent from Hull, answered several thousand miles away with no connection to depend on, reviewed, and a finding raised. Like the screens that follow it, this is a reconstruction - the interface is theirs, and every supplier, answer and finding in it is invented.
The scale of it
What has gone through the yard since 2012.
75,713tonnes of stone
Quarried on four continents, cut and finished in Hull, and delivered to a funeral director somewhere in the country. Around 3,700 tonnes of it in the last full year alone, half of that in shapes nobody had cut before.
1,456funeral directors served
Odlings do not sell to the public. Every memorial goes through somebody sitting with a family, which is why the question of where the stone came from was worth answering before anybody asked it.
20suppliers, all auditable
The number is small because the relationships are long. Every one of them can now be audited, scored and evidenced in the same portal, wherever in the world they are.
Unovo have successfully created an excellent app we now use routinely for our Ethical Purchasing. They were excellent at communicating an understanding of our needs and transferring this knowledge into a functioning product.
The team is agile enough to react to urgent requests and we look forward to continuing to work with them on more complex projects.
Duncan Reynolds
Managing Director, Odlings
Still going
The archivekeeps growing.
Every order Odlings take adds to what the business knows about itself, and every supplier visit adds to what it can prove. Both were true before we arrived; the difference is that the company can get at either of them now. We are still building on that data with them, and what we are building is theirs to talk about rather than ours.
More of the work
No pitch, no deck
Tell us what isactually happening.
Describe the mess in your own words. We will say what we think is going on underneath it, and whether there is anything we could usefully do about it.
Unovo LimitedSteel City Stadium, Olympic Legacy Park
Worksop Road, Sheffield S9 3TL
Registered in England and Wales, company no. 16375453