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The books are closed for 2022, and we continue our strong growth journey. Compared to the previous year, the company's turnover has grown by 40% and we have also maintained profitability, a sign that the business model works well. 3PL operators as well as companies with their own warehouses – such as e-retailers - have begun using our software and on average, almost 3 million deliveries per month have been handled via Ongoing WMS. Growth outside of Sweden has gained more traction, suggesting that Ongoing's offerings are also competitive in the international market.

Additionally, we strengthened our team with approximately 10 new employees in 2022 who are now contributing to Ongoing's strong growth journey. After a slightly uncertain start to 2023 due to the state of the world, we are once again seeing strong demand for our product. This demand is driven by an increased need for cost savings among companies, and we also continue to grow based on recommendations from satisfied customers and existing partners in the ecosystem, all of which benefit from more users for Ongoing WMS. Fredrik Einarsson, CEO of Ongoing, speaks about the past year:

"It has been a challenging year for commerce businesses. Despite this, the company's turnover has increased significantly. Interest rates have risen which has led more companies to seek profitability. Our target group has sought further opportunities to save money by digitizing and streamlining their operations. Two ways they achieve this are by outsourcing their logistics to third-party logistics providers who use Ongoing WMS, or by investing in IT systems for their own warehouse operations. We are confident that the long-term trends within digitalization, e-commerce, automation, and internationalization will continue to contribute to Ongoing's long-term growth. We look forward to continuing to help logistics-intensive companies simplify and connect their logistics."

It is also noteworthy that several players in automation have joined Ongoing's ecosystem of integrations, further strengthening the offering to existing and potential customers, especially those who are considering whether to invest in automation or not - now they know there's a powerful WMS that can handle these connections.

"If one has chosen to invest in automation equipment, it is absolutely necessary to have a robust and powerful WMS that can be seamlessly integrated with the automation systems," explains the CEO. "This is where Ongoing WMS comes in."

In addition to integrations and new initiatives on automation, significant investments have been made in the development, operation, and security of the service we provide.

In summary, the future continues to look bright for Ongoing, our customers, and partners. We continue to assist all our customers in their daily work and we look forward to continuing to grow together and expand into the world!

2022 was a successful year for Ongoing despite a weak sentiment in the economy. How has the first half of 2023 been for Ongoing? 

– Yes, 2022 was a strong year for Ongoing. We gained many new customers and there was good momentum among our existing clients. In the first quarter of 2023, we observed a more cautious stance. It took longer to acquire new customers, and we felt that companies and consumers were holding onto their money more. In the second quarter of 2023, that is, from April to June, it turned around. We once again saw a significant influx of new clients, especially from Norway and Denmark. Our existing customers still seek assistance in streamlining and integrating their logistics, so things are going well.

What's your view on the market situation for the remainder of 2023?

– I am optimistic despite the uncertainty. The large number of new customers we're gaining suggests that market concerns, at least partially, have declined. Sweden's GDP is expected to be slightly negative while Norway, Denmark, and Finland's are predicted to be stagnant or slightly positive. Our main market, the Nordics, is doing fairly well despite market concerns.

If you're wrong and the market climate turns tough, how will Ongoing be affected?

– Of course, we will be affected if things slow down, but many companies look to streamline and automate their operations during tougher times, especially their logistics. Ongoing WMS plays a vital role in this process and is essential both in good times and bad. We help our clients become faster, more agile, and more resilient in all situations! Even today, many WMS software solutions are locally installed, and the shift to cloud-based solutions becomes even more apparent during challenging times, which benefits us.

Ongoing's figures have looked good for a long time. Can it continue?

– Yes. Financially, Ongoing is very strong after 15 uninterrupted years of profitable growth. We are very long-term oriented, with no loans or external financiers demanding quick returns. With over 550 clients and more than 10,000 users, we have a solid foundation. We plan to continue building the company step by step, mainly in the Nordics, but increasingly on a global scale. We grow with our customers and software-developing partners. We have outstanding employees, and we will always prioritize our customers' interests.

How do different trends affect Ongoing?

– We see many trends that are affecting our business. Here is a list of the most prominent ones:

1. The overall trend, both in the Nordics and globally, is that digitalization in warehousing and logistics remains strong and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.
2. As many know, we are particularly dominant in third-party logistics. This niche will continue to grow in the next 5 years in the Nordics and worldwide. We're clearly the market leader in the Nordics and we're growing internationally.
3. Another trend is that companies with their own warehouses or a "hybrid solution", which we refer to as "logistics-intensive companies", increasingly choose specialized software, i.e., a WMS, to manage their warehouse. Previously, they might have managed their warehouse using a module in their ERP system or some other more generic software.
4. We also see a clear trend where logistics-intensive companies, both small growing and large ones, find it a no-brainer to opt for cloud-based software that is quick to deploy with relatively little financial investment. Older, locally installed WMSs requiring extensive consultancy support are on the decline.
5. The trend that software should communicate seamlessly will continue. Customers should even be able to set up integrations themselves within minutes. Our clients expect Ongoing's WMS to communicate with all surrounding software, like ERP systems, webshops, shipping platforms, and various automation systems.
6. Two other trends positively affecting Ongoing are the long-term growth of e-commerce and the automation of warehouses. With the growth of e-commerce, warehouse workers now do the piece-picking that was previously done by consumers in stores. This means piece-picking becomes a larger part of warehouse work and a bigger portion of the value is added in the warehouse. Therefore, it becomes even more essential to streamline the picking processes with a combination of a powerful WMS and automation to keep costs in check.

How do you envision things a few years down the line? Where will you grow? 

– Even though we have clients in 30 countries, the Nordics are our primary focus for obvious reasons. This is where the majority of our clients are and also where we have a vast ecosystem of different software partners. Sweden and Norway are the largest, but Denmark and Finland are on the rise. Our internationalization outside the Nordics is largely driven by our clients and partners expanding globally. Many of our clients operate internationally and wish to use Ongoing WMS outside the Nordics. So, Ongoing WMS is now used worldwide. The Nordics, with its 27 million inhabitants and a well-developed business environment, is a great market for us. We share similar languages, cultures, and values. There's a sense of unity. The Nordics top the list (IMD World Digital Competitiveness Ranking) of the world's countries excelling in digitalizing various business operations. Denmark ranks first, followed by the USA and Sweden, and closely followed by Finland and Norway. Thus, we, our partners, and our clients are at the global forefront of digitalization.

For third-party logistics providers (3PLs), ensuring smooth operations and a transparent customer relationship is essential. With this in mind, Ongoing WMS has rolled out its latest feature – the Customer Lobby – a comprehensive dashboard tailored to the specific needs of 3PLs and their customers. From real-time error notifications to intricate statistics of order management, this tool aims to redefine how customers of 3PLs interact with and understand their supply chain processes. Here is what to expect:

• Error Tracking: The dashboard highlights orders with issues like status errors, un-pickable rankings, and understocked articles, making it easier to address them.

• Integration Health: The dashboard indicates the current status of integrations and automated emails, alerting users to any issues.

• Operational Metrics: Get a clearer picture of warehouse operations with metrics on created, picked, received, and returned orders.

• Order Status Overview: A pie chart shows current order statuses, indicating which ones are pickable, not pickable, picked, or shipped.

• Purchase Order Insights: Another pie chart provides a count of purchase orders expected to arrive today, those in progress, and those received today.

• Timeframe Views: Users can adjust the dashboard's view to see order data from 'Today', 'Last week', 'Last month', or 'Last year' for better analysis.

The lobby is available by default for goods owners with a 3PL customer login, displayed right at login or via Statistics > Customer lobby in the top menu.

Efficiency and optimization are paramount in warehouse management. The ABC classification system offers a structured methodology to categorize inventory based on their significance:

• Category A: These items are of utmost importance and are considered essential to operations.

• Category B: While still being of significant value, these items are not as critical as those in Category A.

• Category C: These are necessary items but they have a reduced priority compared to the above categories.

Utilizing the ABC classification not only facilitates organization but also enhances operational efficiency, by positioning the most vital items in easily accessible locations.

Enhancements Offered by Ongoing WMS

Ongoing WMS has integrated advanced features to ensure a seamless ABC classification experience:

• Manual Classification: Users can directly classify items according to their discernment.

•  Assisted Manual Classification: For instances where there's uncertainty regarding an item's classification, our system provides statistical insights to aid decision-making.

• Automated Classification: Ongoing WMS offers an automation feature, where items are classified at predetermined intervals.
  
  

Distinctive Features for Enhanced User Experience

Ongoing WMS’s ABC classification is equipped with several user-centric features:

• Comprehensive ABC Classification Dialogue: A well-structured table format ensures easy and efficient article sorting.

• Adaptable Filters: These filters enable users to curate their views, displaying only relevant articles.

• Automatic Clearing: The system is designed to intelligently clear classifications for articles that remain untouched or unmodified.
  
  

Ongoing and Golden EDI have numerous mutual customers within e-commerce, business with a high reliance on warehouse operations, and third-party logistics who use Golden EDI's services for integration and Ongoing's warehouse management system, Ongoing WMS, for their warehouses. Now, they are simplifying the connection between the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central ERP system and Ongoing WMS even further. This is done by launching a complete offer – Ongoing WMS Connector – on Microsoft App Source that completely links necessary functions in Microsoft Business Central and Ongoing WMS. With the launch in App Source and Microsoft's rigorous quality controls, it becomes easier for more users of Business Central to find Ongoing WMS. All this is to enable more companies to have as simple and connected logistics as possible!

Fredrik Einarsson, CEO of Ongoing, comments on the connector: "This offer allows companies around the world using Microsoft Business Central and managing their own warehouses to quickly connect all their logistics and streamline their processes out in the warehouse with the help of Ongoing WMS."

Mats Persson, CEO of Golden EDI, continues: "The cooperation with Ongoing points to an ongoing trend where customers should be able to choose the parts, or apps, that provide the best effect for the business and in this way strengthen their competitiveness. The solution itself shows the power and flexibility we have in our Golden EDI platform. We think of this as a packaged vertical solution on top of our horizontal platform. We work hard to simplify and streamline everything from settings of integrations to the business processes themselves."

In short, the offer means that a company that has warehouse operations and where Microsoft Business Central is used as a business system can easily start digitalizing and streamlining its warehouse processes via Ongoing WMS Connector and Ongoing WMS. With relatively limited efforts, the integration can be up and running in less than half the time compared to traditional integration.

Through Golden EDI's Software-as-a-Service offer for Ongoing WMS Connector, and a fixed monthly fee, companies can be sure that their integration connection follows Microsoft's development of Business Central.

Ongoing WMS often becomes particularly interesting to companies when they discover that the business system's warehouse module lacks features such as scanning functions to reduce incorrect picks, a user interface that is not adapted for a warehouse worker, or when they want to collect productivity data for their employees in the warehouse. Now, the transition to Ongoing WMS as a warehouse management system becomes much more manageable!

For more information on Ongoing WMS Connector, contact Golden EDI at contact@goldenedi.com.

If you are a dedicated user newsletter subscriber, you are probably familiar with the extensive integration section featured in each edition. The people behind the hard work to keep our integrations up-to-date and running for our over 10.000 WMS users are Karl-Oskar Gunnarsson and Ronny Videkull. In April this year, they formed a new team that solely focuses on developing and improving our in-house built integrations: one of the cornerstones of Ongoings offering to users worldwide. “I had already been working with our integrations for almost two years when Karl-Oskar joined me in April this year. We are both customer-responsible software engineers at the core but are currently working with our internal integrations full-time,” Ronny explains.

Their combined background as software developers serves as a strong foundation for understanding the complexities involved in integration development and maintenance. Karl-Oskar explains their roles by saying, “We are responsible for developing new integrations and new features for our existing integrations. There is also a lot of troubleshooting. Essentially, it’s maintenance.” Ronny adds, “We focus mainly on our standard integrations, but there may also be customer-specific integrations that are specially developed according to the customer's needs. In these cases, the customer-responsible developer is mostly responsible for building and maintaining these integrations.”

One of the significant advantages of having a dedicated integration team is the speed and efficiency in resolving issues. Ronny explains, “We essentially become aware of almost all the errors that occur in our integrations, and those that occur repeatedly, we can either build a solution that handles the error so that it never occurs again, or we in our team can solve the error quickly because we have solved a similar problem before. This results in much faster resolutions for the customers.” Karl-Oskar adds, “We also avoid the risk of having our customer-responsible developers solving the same problem. If there is a problem with any of our standard integrations, more than one customer usually calls us to point out the error. This resulted in several developers troubleshooting in parallel with each other. With our team, troubleshooting and taking action become more efficient and time-saving.”

Re-commerce, or the process of reselling used goods, has become increasingly popular in recent years. The benefits of reducing waste and extending the lifespan of products are clear, and companies like rebolet are leading the way in making re-commerce accessible to retailers worldwide. Rebolet is currently on a mission to rescue one billion items from destruction, making re-commerce accessible to any online retailer. They achieve this by reselling used goods, thereby extending the lifespan of products, and reducing waste.

To achieve their goals, Rebolet bases their warehouse operations on Ongoing WMS, which enables them to process items quickly and efficiently. In a recent interview with Alessandro Bartsch, Head of Engineering at Rebolet, he explained how Ongoing WMS is the backbone of their operations, from receiving items to preparing and sending out orders. "Nearly everything is done by Ongoing," Bartsch said. This level of integration is essential for companies like Rebolet, where speed and efficiency are key to their success.

When Bartsch was asked why they initially chose Ongoing WMS as their preferred software for managing their warehouse operations, he explained that it was because they were one of the few companies that promised all the features and adjustments they needed. "We also like to work with European companies to support our local development. It was a win-win," he added.

Seamless collaboration delights both parties

The biggest benefit of using Ongoing WMS, according to Bartsch, is its flexibility. "In re-commerce, it was tough to find a system suiting our needs," he said. But with Ongoing WMS, Rebolet was able to customize the system to fit their unique requirements. "Together with Frida Eriksson [Rebolet's personal contact at Ongoing], we got to customize the system to meet our exact needs, and we continue to implement changes at a rapid pace." He further expressed how effortless it has been to work with Ongoing. "Communication with Ongoing is always a bliss. This is something we really appreciate."

Frida Eriksson also had positive things to say about their collaboration. "I think the collaboration between me and Alessandro Bartsch has been great from the start," she said. "He is always structured in his problem descriptions, which makes it easy for me as a developer to implement the desired logic into their different Ongoing workflows. You can tell he's a skilled developer himself by the way Rebolet has utilized Ongoing's different features – webhooks, API, and so on. Together we have set up their Ongoing system to something fitting their specific needs, still depending a lot on the standard functionality of Ongoing, even though they are not the 'standard' Ongoing customer."

shipcloud enhances the efficiency further

Another key factor in their success is the integration between Ongoing WMS and the shipping and return platform shipcloud GmbH, partners of Ongoing. "These two systems saved us both time and money," Bartsch said. "Although it's possible that we could have developed these systems ourselves, doing so would have delayed the launch of our service and resulted in significantly higher costs. Thus, by partnering with Ongoing and shipcloud, we were able to accelerate our growth and profitability while maintaining our focus on sustainability."

Finally, Bartsch shared how both Ongoing WMS and shipcloud are helping Rebolet reach their sustainability goals. "We are committed to minimizing our environmental impact and leaving behind as small a carbon footprint as possible. By choosing to work with Ongoing WMS and shipcloud, we believe that we have found strong allies in our efforts to achieve a carbon-neutral future and contribute to making the world a better place, one step at a time,” he concludes.