How Sticker Mule Improved Labour Productivity by 10% with Pusher

E-commerce is one of the biggest and fastest growing industries in the world, across different sectors of the economy. In such a crowded industry, speed is vital and businesses must always look to streamlining operations to increase competitiveness. This case study demonstrates how Sticker Mule achieved that with Pusher, increasing their productivity significantly, and how you can too.

Sticker Mule manufactures custom stickers for customers ranging from individuals to large companies. Featuring customers such as GitHub and Reddit, they aim to produce high-quality stickers available in a variety of styles and shapes.

The Problem

Sticker Mule had used a third party app to link their e-commerce and manufacturing apps. In that system, a 1-time import would be made from e-commerce to manufacturing when orders were received.

This was an issue as the app was not tightly integrated and real-time functionality was not available. As an order moved through different stages of the manufacturing process (such as from printing of stickers to the finish, and then to cutting), it would have to be manually updated on each instance to ensure that all users were in sync.

Sticker Mule needed a way to enhance the responsiveness of their system. To do that, an improved app would need to be real-time to ensure an order would be automatically updated across all running instances as it progressed through the production cycle.

The Solution

While Sticker Mule considered simply improving the integration of their existing third-party app, they decided to build their own custom app that would be perfectly integrated and designed for their needs.

Having considered several options, Sticker Mule ultimately preferred the tools and API that Pusher offered. In combination with Backbone and Marionette, Sticker Mule built a custom app that enabled the real-time functionality they needed to enhance the responsiveness of their system to changes and updates to their orders.

Results

· Ease of use – Sticker Mule has reported no issues with the integration and deployment of Pusher ever since its launch, highlighting its debug console and event creator features as particularly helpful.

· Increased responsiveness – by providing real-time functionality, an update on one instance of the manufacturing app will now update across all running instances, improving synchronisation across different stages of production in the factory.

· Greater efficiency – Sticker Mule has been able to cut 6 hours from its average production cycle time of 54 hours, resulting in a 48 hour cycle. Correspondingly, the number of units produced per hour work has increased by 10%.

Future Developments

Having successfully integrated Pusher into their manufacturing process, Sticker Mule continues to enhance and refine their new app and further improvements are widely expected.

Sticker Mule now plans to integrate Pusher’s real-time functionality further into their other back-end systems. Mobile label printing is currently being enabled via the app, and they eventually plan on connecting the app to the machines themselves, allowing for fully automatic updates in the near future.

Conclusion

Sticker Mule’s success with Pusher has important implications for other businesses involved in e-commerce who might seek to enhance their production efficiency.

As Sticker Mule has demonstrated, improvement is not restricted to the act of physical manufacturing itself. By using Pusher in their custom app to improve backend systems, they were able to cut down on production time at the various stages where orders are updated and transmitted as they progress through the production cycle.

Sticker Mule

More Intuitive.

More Responsive.

More Efficient.

Enhance your business with real-time, in real-time. www.pusher.com

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A PDF version of this case study is available for download here.