The people behind it
Fettle's founder spent them running solutions for warehouses rather than selling them.
Steve Coleman ran the systems behind Andrew Page, the national parts distributor, for twenty-eight years, with stock going out to 120 branches all day and mechanics waiting at the other end for the part. He was the one being sold to: WMS vendors, analytics firms and anybody else with a new system, plenty of whom needed him to explain the warehouse before they could say anything useful about it.
It means we ask the questions you'd ask and know which numbers tend to go wrong, and why. Nobody here needs an ugly explained.
Fettle is made by Picture Perfect Data, a team of analysts and developers in Leeds. Before Fettle had a name, the same team did this kind of work on top of the systems at some of the UK's largest retailers and logistics businesses, all of it won by word of mouth. Fettle packages what that work taught us about warehouses, supply chains and logistics, so you get to the value quicker without paying us to start from scratch.
Over those twenty-eight years the business grew from five branches to 120. Any branch could sell stock held at any other, which put every product in the range within a working day of any customer.
What the systems had to carry
A national motor parts distributor, over Steve Coleman's twenty-eight years as IT Director. Branches and turnover show the growth across that time.
The customers were garages with a car on the ramp, so a late or wrong part was noticed the same morning. A lot of parts came back as well, since a garage doesn't always know exactly which one it needs. Plenty of warehouses share that mix of a huge range, small orders and a customer waiting at the other end, which is where most of the questions we'll ask about yours were learned.
When somebody came in to sell Steve a system and said they knew his business, he asked them one thing: how does your system handle exhausts? Exhausts are uglies, long and awkward and nothing like a box. Their answer told him straight away whether they'd ever stood in a parts warehouse. Most of them hadn't.
Ask the same of everybody coming in to talk to you about analytics, using your own uglies instead of exhausts. Ask it of us as well. The answer worth hearing is often: I haven't come across that, tell me about it.
Steve was responsible for operations as well as IT, reporting to the CFO. In most businesses those three sit apart. The warehouse is judged on getting today's orders out, the systems team on uptime and finance on the month's numbers, so work that needs all three tends to fall between them.
Holding all three meant every system had to work on the floor and pay its way on the numbers. From 2010 Steve was building his own views of the warehouses' problems in Tableau, to answer the questions the standard reports left open.
Fettle sits in the same place. It reads what the systems already record, shows the warehouse what needs attention today and shows finance what moving each number is worth.
The return depends on the warehouse, so these are results rather than a promise. Each one comes from a warehouse we've worked in.
12.5%
More output from the same people, by regrouping the pick lists rather than asking anyone to work harder
A warehouse of around 600 people we've worked in, measured before and after the change
£23,000 a week
Less spent on agency labour, from planning demand better
Agency spend in a warehouse we've worked in
Around 37%
Better pick efficiency, from grouping the pick work to cut out avoidable travel, without touching the WMS
Pick efficiency in another warehouse we've worked in
Underneath the money there's usually something the systems couldn't see.
572 hours in one week sat between operators clocking on and starting their first task, time no report ever showed
A best picker lost 24 minutes of 57 to stock that wasn't where the system said it was. None of it was recorded, so standard times alone would have marked her down
Pickers walked 950 metres to fill three cages, paying for the layout on every trip
Pickers in one warehouse kept leaving their trolleys at the end of the aisle and walking down and back for every pick, which looked like wasted effort on any report. The trolleys were more than half as wide as the aisle, so a parked trolley blocked the stock for anybody else who needed to get past. The pickers had found a sensible way round a problem nobody had measured.
One forklift driver's put-away figures were so far ahead of everybody else's that he was held up as the example to follow. He was overriding the system and dropping each pallet in the nearest free space at ground level, which spread one product across a whole run of pick faces and made every pick after it slower. He was doing exactly what the report rewarded, so the fix was a better report and a conversation rather than blame.
Procurement bought extra batteries near the year end to hit a supplier rebate, which made sense on their side of the business. Nobody told the warehouse until the containers turned up on the day, with no space, no labour and no plan for them. The warehouse manager was then judged against a plan he'd had no part in making.
A distribution warehouse of around 600 people went looking for a labour management system in 2026 and chose us instead, on a promise to find the savings in its own data rather than measure its people against a standard. The work started in the summer, on top of the WMS it already runs.
Regrouping the pick lists alone lifted output 12.5 per cent, by changing the method rather than asking anybody to work harder. The full saving is being measured now.
Book an hour and bring the awkward question from your own warehouse. The demo is set up for the kind of warehouse you run, with the rate coming out at the end.