Digitising Legacy Purchasing and Ordering for Kakujoe Gyorui

Excellent Service. Delicate Product

Kakujoe Gyorui is a Japanese fish retailer, operating specialty stores in Kanto and Shinetsu regions. Due to the expansion of the business, manual processes for purchasing and order tracking were no longer fast or accurate enough for Kakujoe.

Kakujoe’s product is fresh fish, and to avoid spoilage and guarantee the best service, orders have to be processed in a timely manner with strict quality control.

For this reason, Monstarlab was contracted to develop an original app and streamline the process.

Untangling Legacy Processes

Before the digital transformation, Kakujoe relied on manual tracking of ordering and purchasing data. The process was prone to inaccuracies, errors, and involved extensive paperwork, which wasn’t sustainable for a growing business. 

Purchasing and delivery usually happen on the same day and it created a huge clerical burden. Visual inspection added an additional challenge — employees could take as many as 500 photos on a single day, which had to be sifted through to find the correct one.

To address the problem, Monstarlab performed an extensive study of the business model, and leveraged agile methodology and UX/UI design principles to find a way to modernise and digitise operations with no disruption.

Peerless and Paperless 

The end result: a clean and easy-to-use application that allowed Kakujoe’s employees to maintain an accurate and fully paperless purchasing process.

The UI of the app closely follows the format of the original sales slips, but the entire workflow is quick, intuitive, and centralised. 

According to usability tests, staff found the new process to be as easy and intuitive as the old one. 

After the app was introduced, errors and inaccuracies went down, quality and efficiency improved, and mountains of paperwork turned to almost zero. 

Besides, Kakujoe got easy access to business-critical data that can be leveraged to further improve the growing enterprise, staying true to the original mission statement the company had since 1974 – to be the best fish shop in Japan.