Mediahuis: Active Ants offers us more than we were expecting
Publisher Mediahuis has been a customer of bpost for many years, with the latter dispatching both Mediahuis’s newspapers and the products sold through their webshop. Given the growth of their webshop activity, bpost recommended that Mediahuis switch to the more automated e-fulfilment partner within the bpost group, Active Ants, when it started operating in Willebroek, Belgium at the beginning of the summer.
“Since the launch of our webshop we have been working in partnership with bpost for the storage and shipping of products sold through our webshop. Over the past few months, we have been running close to the capacity that bpost can offer, so we were definitely interested in a new solution. In Active Ants we have found not only a supplier offering more space, but also a partner that can grow with us and that is much more modern in terms of set-up and follow-up,” says Aline Delnoy, Business manager e-commerce at Mediahuis.
Mediahuis and Active Ants were able to organise the full transfer of activity in two weeks. The transfer went really smoothly and the customers never noticed a thing.
Koen De Keersmaecker, Project Manager e-commerce at Mediahuis adds: “The fully automated process is definitely an advantage. We are also particularly enamoured with the reporting system, which offers us a lot more transparency than before, in real time. We now have a perfect overview of stock, storage capacity and shipping. That really adds value for all teams involved in our e-commerce activity and allows us to be a lot more flexible.
Both Aline and Koen agree on the fact that the personalisation of packages and the sustainable way of working are factors that were not explicit requirements but which would doubtless become so in the future. “The attention that Active Ants gives to adapting the size of the package to the specific product (meaning that it also carries as little air as possible), working with recycled cardboard, charging robots through solar power, and so on... for us, these are all bonuses of the partnership. In that respect, Active Ants offers us more than we had hoped for.”
Caption photo in header: Aline Delnoy, Team manager e-commerce Mediahuis, and Kevin Pans, sales manager Active Ants België
