We know that one of the biggest problems when it comes to ordering new PPE, safety workwear and equipment is, well, ordering it.
From old-school catalogues to complicated e-procurement systems; navigating the buying process can be a long and painful journey. The PPE and safety workwear industry is hard to buy from at the best of times; the last thing you need is difficulty buying directly from your preferred supplier.
We’ve made sure that buying from LION is easy, hassle-free and customer-centric. Your buying experience should always be seamless and optimised for you. There are 3 main ways of ordering from us depending on your preferred buying methods:
- Use our Online Portal
- Place an order over the phone
- Email us your order
What do we recommend? The best way to order from us is via our Online Portal. Our bespoke user-optimised platform can be set up to suit your company’s specific requirements. From personnel packs to quick bulk ordering, we have several features that are designed to make your life easier and take the pain out of ordering PPE, safety workwear and equipment.
What is the Online Portal?
LION’s online portal is a user-optimised online shop hosted by Orderwise. Designed with buyer experience in mind, the portal makes buying PPE, safety workwear and equipment easy for you, your teams and your operatives. The best part? We can set it up to be bespoke for your organisation.
The portal has many key features that will help make ordering your items a lot easier:
- Quick Order
- Saved Items
- Personnel Pack Module
- Quotes
- Account Details
- View Order History
- Saved Baskets
- Advanced Search Functionality
- Order Branded Workwear Online
Let’s take a closer look at what these features can do for you.
Quick Order
Quick order is a favourite function among our clients. Gone are the days of trawling an online shop for products, and sizes, manually adding each new item.
If you know the codes you used when you ordered products last time, you will be able to input them in seconds.
Better yet, if you have a regular order or certain products you use a lot, you can keep this data in an excel/CSV file alongside the quantities and sizes required and upload the quick order sheet.
That’s right, no more site-trawling for you!
The ability to upload a quick and easy order sheet saves a lot of time for administrators and anybody else who is in charge of ordering for you. Better yet, there is a sample quick order sheet online, so you can download that and populate it with your information before you upload it again.
Once you’ve uploaded your quick order sheet or inputted the codes for your items, you can either quote your basket, which allows the LION team to see if you are getting the best deal on those items, or you can simply go straight to checkout.
Saved Items
This feature is like a favourites list. With this feature, you can create lists which allow you to go back and reorder from that list or share that list with others in your organisation.
What’s so exciting about a favourites list? Similar to Quick Ordering, this feature is all about speed and ease. We love to see clients use this list functionality as an easy way to differentiate between item lists that they might need for separate teams.
Saved Items come in handy when you are likely to place orders for the same items regularly.
Personnel Pack Module
The Personnel Packs module is a firm favourite amongst our bigger clients who have multiple sites and hundreds of employees.
This feature takes the pain out of buying PPE, safety workwear and equipment for your entire organisation.
Personnel Packs allow you to control the spending of your employee allowances for their safety items.
There are a few ways of setting this up, but the most popular 2 are:
- Allowing admin to order on behalf of employees to be delivered directly to the employee address
- Allow the employees to order their items directly as users who will require approval from a primary user or supervisory admin.
This module is flexible so that you can set up departments, teams, or job roles to assign employees to. Setting up these different fields for employees means that you can make only the agreed products available to particular groups of employees.
For example; if you have different departments requiring different gear, you can ensure that staff members can only see the products available to the departments they have been allocated to.
One of the best things about this module is the scope for customisation and varying levels of control. On one end of the scale, you can have your staff order their items for themselves with visible prices and no control or approval measures; on the other end of the scale you can have staff order their items with only a points system visible (instead of prices) and those orders have to go through different levels of approval within your organisation to be released to us. It is completely up to you, completely customisable by you and easy for you to set up and continue to use.
Tell me more about Points Allocation
The points allocation system is a great way to award staff members a set budget for their PPE, safety workwear and equipment without them being aware of the actual cost to your organisation. By choosing points instead of currency, your employees can be awarded a set number of points to use over a defined period. Each product within the group (department, team, site, etc) that a member of staff is in, will be allocated a certain value of points.
Tell me more about Approval
Approval is another completely customisable feature of our Personnel Packs module. When enabled, this feature allows you to make sure your users’ orders have to be approved by a supervisor/primary user. We find that most of our clients like to have a stage of approval for accounts where employees are submitting orders as direct users. This is for two reasons:
- It frees up the time of the admin staff by letting operatives order their items
- It means that all orders are checked by the admin before going through to ensure that staff are not ordering surplus kits or items that they do not need.
If approval is set up, employees will order their items, they will then be sent to designated supervisors. The supervisors will get an email saying there is an order ready for approval, they can then login and approve the order.
Tell me more about Delivery Locations
One of our favourite features of the personnel packs module is the capability for staff to order their uniforms and kits directly to their home addresses. Your staff get their kit on time at a location that suits them, and you can start your projects on time.
You can also set up delivery locations to a hub or site if you don’t want items going to home addresses.
If you are getting orders to a set location, you can group multiple orders for employees and have them delivered to 1 location but still have them separately packaged for each employee.
Other Benefits of Personnel Packs
Ease of ordering aside, this module can make your life easier in other ways.
This simple system gives you the ability to ensure that your staff get the right kit, that the kit being issued is controlled and that the spending is under control too. Personnel packs can eliminate the need for keeping messy and disorganised stores, paper systems and your employees having to sign kits out. All of this has been moved online and can be accessed anywhere with an internet connection.
Personnel Packs is a personalised delivery of uniform for your employee and a record of what each employee has been issued with and when for you. You can also get reports from the system that break down your spending however you’d like it, for example: spend per employee, location and product category.
Quotes
The quotes function allows you to request a quote for items in your basket and effectively raise an order as a quote. This is to allow LION to review the pricing and, if you do not have pre-agreed rates set up, offer a better rate if applicable. Once you have received your quote from us, you can order from that quote directly with just a click of a button.
This speeds up the buying process significantly.
With this feature, you can also view all your past quotes and their expiry dates. You can view them in either PDF format or in a digital/live format that you can order from. This means that you can always see what prices you have been quoted and can easily re-order from past quotes.
View Order History
This feature allows you to view all previous orders and re-order from past orders at the click of a button.
You can view your invoices and track your deliveries here too.
Saved Baskets
Saved baskets is a handy feature if you need to exit windows or build up several baskets for future purchases.
From an admin perspective, if you’re doing more orders and want to split them into different orders for different locations but do not have the personnel pack module, this is a great alternative.
Search functionality
We have an advanced search functionality tool that allows you to search partial words, codes, descriptions, brand names, sizes, colours etc and returns results quickly. If the product code searched is an exact match, it will bring up the product page straight away.
This function allows you to search categories as well as products and will include descriptions and prices in the search bar to make navigation easier.
Order Branded Workwear Online
If you have a branded stock holding, or if you want to purchase branded workwear online, we can arrange to have this set up.
Customisation is not available for guest users, so if you want to order branded stock online, you need to have an account first and a stock-holding agreement in place.
Being able to order your branded workwear online removes the hassle of having to remember to add any additional logos to plain garments when ordering. Branded products will also be listed online with their final price, meaning that there are no surprise extra charges for branding.
If you have a stockholding agreement, quantities of stock held branded will appear in green under each product (if branded). If you don’t have any branded items in stock, the portal will show the option as ‘available to order on a short lead time’.
How do I get set up?
You can set up a trade account on our online portal today.
All you need to do is fill out our trade account form, and a member of the LION team will be in touch to discuss your application and take it forward. This will involve setting up a tailored product and price list as well as ensuring any departments and initial teams of operatives are set up for you.
If you have any questions about LION’s portal or want to discuss setting one up with a member of our team, get in touch.
