Pinturas Eurotex digitalises its e-commerce warehouse

Eurotex: innovation, quality and excellence

For over 40 years, Eurotex has manufactured and marketed paints, coatings, varnishes and solvents for industrial, professional and private use. The company incorporates the latest technologies in its production processes to offer high-performance, high-quality products. Eurotex follows a rigorous environmental policy: its production systems are designed to reduce emissions and energy consumption.

• Headquarters: Seville (Spain)
• Founded in: 1981
• No. of employees: 150+
• Points of sale: 90+
• Production capacity: 22,000 tonnes of paint annually

Eurotex, a manufacturer of paints, coatings, varnishes and solvents, has established itself as a benchmark in its sector. The business has a plant in Seville (Spain) spanning over 33,000 m² and a production capacity of 20,000 tonnes of paint a year.

The company sells its paints in department stores, hardware stores and franchises on the Iberian Peninsula. It has also been marketing its products online for some years now. “Eurotex launched its online sales channel three years before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic,” says Enrique Domínguez, Logistics Manager at Eurotex.

In Seville, the Eurotex warehouse used to manage e-commerce orders is the nerve centre of the online shop. From there, thousands of orders are sent every day to industrial, professional and private customers throughout the Iberian Peninsula.

To manage the online order facility more efficiently, Eurotex has installed Easy WMS warehouse management software from Mecalux. “We’ve been Mecalux customers for years, since we set up pallet racking in one of our facilities. At that time, we were considering implementing a warehouse management system to complement our SAP ERP system, and Mecalux told us about Easy WMS. When we broke into the e-commerce world, digitalising the facility became a need. After comparing several solutions on the market, we chose Easy WMS because of its features,” says Enrique Pavón, IT Manager at Eurotex.

In the past, goods management and the organisation of operations to manage e-commerce orders were done manually. Operators would enter the items received and the orders dispatched in the company’s SAP ERP system. Domínguez says: “Going from an ERP system to Easy WMS has helped us optimise the time we dedicate to our operations — order picking, in particular.”

According to Domínguez, Easy WMS played a crucial role during the pandemic: “With all shops closed during the lockdown, many people took advantage of the free time to paint their homes. As a result, the volume of orders in our online shop rose much more than we’d anticipated.

Other sectors are more accustomed to e-commerce, but we sell paint, so the changes in consumer habits took us more by surprise. Thanks to Easy WMS, we were able to efficiently manage the thousands of online orders we received every day.”

Logistics adapted to e-commerce

“With the digitalisation of our e-commerce warehouse, operators can now prepare — in under an hour — any order that comes in via the internet and that contains products in stock. Our facility works in real time so that customer orders will be delivered within 24-48 hours,” says Pavón.

Operations in Eurotex’s e-commerce warehouse begin with the receipt of the finished product from the production plant. Digitalisation has streamlined processes. Operators no longer have to make a note of the products that arrive at the loading docks one by one. Instead, they simply scan the barcodes with their RF scanners to automatically enter the items in the Easy WMS database.

To store the goods, Easy WMS employs rules and parameterisable algorithms to assign each item a location taking into account its characteristics and turnover. “Another improvement we’ve seen with Easy WMS is product control. Inventory is perpetual: the quantities of goods we have are updated in real time, which gives us strict stock control,” says Pavón.

Order picking is the most crucial operation in the Eurotex e-commerce facility. “When a customer makes a purchase on the web, the request is recorded in our ERP system. The ERP then notifies Easy WMS of the order the operators need to prepare in the warehouse,” says Pavón.

The Mecalux software designs a route that optimises operator travel when picking the orders, saving time and speeding up operations. “Aided by their RF scanners, the operators follow the orders from the WMS to pick and put together the orders. Easy WMS tells them exactly where to locate each item and how many to remove,” says Pavón.

Thanks to digitalisation, the Eurotex facility no longer prints out delivery notes. The operators use RF scanners to follow instructions from Easy WMS in real time. This has reduced operator movements and streamlined the shipment of thousands of daily orders to customers.

To ensure efficient management of the entire Eurotex warehouse, Easy WMS is in constant, two-way communication with the company’s ERP system. “The integration of Easy WMS with our SAP ERP system was better than we’d expected. Mecalux’s team of specialists was very patient and attentive to all our needs,” says Pavón.

In the consolidation area, workers verify that the orders contain the correct items. They then package the goods, label them and sort the orders by delivery agency.

Easy WMS has made it much easier to create and print the necessary documentation for carriers with the aim of eliminating errors. The documents include shipping information and the package contents, essential data for carriers to do their work more effectively.

Digital transformation to improve customer satisfaction

The large amount of orders to prepare, speedy product dispatch, and seasonality are just some of the challenges e-commerce warehouses face on a daily basis. Backed by Mecalux’s expertise, Eurotex has made the leap to online sales with a twofold objective in mind: to serve all its customers on time and bolster its business growth. “Easy WMS has helped us to ensure that our online strategy meets our customers’ needs,” says Pavón. Now, the paint manufacturer controls its warehouse operations digitally to eliminate errors, improve processes and maximise efficiency. Moreover, Easy WMS is scalable and can adapt to changes at Eurotex, such as business growth or the launch of new business lines. “We plan to increase our order numbers, consolidate our online strategy and, in the future, implement Easy WMS in the other two warehouses for finished product we have at our headquarters in Seville,” says Pavón.

We rate Easy WMS warehouse management software from Mecalux very positively. It’s helped us in all operations, enabling us to dispatch orders within a day. The program’s extremely intuitive, and it’s increased operator throughput.