Flying
Elephant

We build the software your business runs on, and the hardware it talks to.

Flying Elephant is a small team of software and hardware engineers. We make CRM, ERP and WMS systems for companies that buy, store and ship things, we wire up the offices and warehouses they live in, and we design the devices at the shelf edge.

Talk to us See what we have built

What we build

Software

  • CRM Customer records, quotes, follow-ups and reporting, shaped around how your sales team actually works rather than a generic pipeline.
  • ERP Purchasing, stock, orders, invoicing and accounts in one place, with the integrations to your couriers, marketplaces and bank.
  • WMS Warehouse management that runs on handhelds and label printers: receiving, put-away, picking, packing and stock counts without spreadsheets.
  • Data clean-up and migration Moving years of customer and product data between systems, with duplicates found and merged before they become someone's problem.

Hardware and networks

  • Office and warehouse networks Design, cabling, Wi-Fi, VLANs, VPN between sites and failover links. We run our own across two countries, so we know what breaks at 3 a.m.
  • E-ink labels and displays Electronic shelf labels and status screens that update from your stock system, with custom firmware when the off-the-shelf kind will not do.
  • Custom gadgets Small purpose-built devices from PCB to case: recorders, sensors, kiosks, scanners. Firmware, enclosure and the service they report to.
  • Servers and hosting On-premise virtualisation and cloud, backups that are tested, and the monitoring that tells you before your customers do.

From database to shelf edge

Most firms hand you one layer and point at someone else for the rest. We take the whole line, so a price change in the ERP is on the shelf label a minute later, and the person who wrote the API is the person who flashed the label.

The stack Flying Elephant builds, end to end Five connected stages: database and ERP or WMS software, APIs and integrations, the office and warehouse network, base stations and gateways, and finally the devices at the shelf edge such as e-ink labels, handhelds and sensors.
A price change travels from the ERP to the e-ink label on the shelf. Every stage on this line is ours.

Selected work

  • Warehouse management for a cross-border e-commerce retailer Replaced spreadsheets and a legacy ERP with a WMS that runs on handheld scanners across two warehouses. Receiving, picking and stock counts are now scanned, not typed, and the ERP and WMS share one product catalogue after we merged 40,000 duplicate customer and product records.
  • Two offices, one network, two countries Designed and built the network for a company with sites in Shenzhen and the UK: segmented VLANs for staff, guests, cameras and devices, a pair of gateways that fail over to each other in seconds, and a VPN that lets a sales rep abroad use the office systems as if at their desk.
  • Electronic shelf labels with NFC unlock E-ink price labels that pull prices from the stock system through our own base station firmware, plus an NFC tap for staff to unlock and edit a label on the spot. Custom firmware on an off-the-shelf tag, because the vendor firmware could not do it.
  • A meeting recorder that writes its own minutes A palm-sized device with a round display that records a meeting, uploads the audio over Wi-Fi to an on-premise server, and sends back a transcript and summary. Hardware, firmware, server and the speech models all run on the client's own kit.

How we work

  1. Walk the floor We start in your warehouse, shop or office, not in a requirements document. Watching a picker for an hour tells us more than a workshop with the management team.
  2. Build the thin version first A working slice in weeks, used by real staff with real stock, so the mistakes are found while they are cheap. We would rather ship a small thing that is right than a big thing that is nearly right.
  3. Put it in production ourselves We install the servers, flash the devices, run the cables and train the people. There is no hand-off to a different company for "the IT part".
  4. Stay on the hook Monitoring, backups and a person who answers. Systems that handle stock and money are never finished, and we plan for that from the start.

About

Flying Elephant Ltd is a UK company with engineers in the UK and in Shenzhen. The team has spent the last decade building and running systems for trading and retail businesses, and the hardware side grew out of needing devices that did not exist yet. Being small means the people you meet are the people who do the work.