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About Craig

I started on the warehouse floor.

Twenty-five years later, I'm a business operations consultant still solving the same problems, just from the other side of the table.

I've worked at every level in these businesses, not as a consultant brought in to observe. I picked, packed and despatched on the warehouse floor, kept things running as the IT engineer, and ran the operation as the ops manager. I implemented the systems, worked with them every day, and fixed what needed fixing.

That's why I know what a system needs to do for the person using it, not just the person commissioning it.

Book a callHow I build
Craig Blackman on a wide sandy beach under a grey sky, smiling, hands in the pockets of a black jacket, the sea behind him.
decodedops.co.uk · DO-ART-904 · Rev 03

Craig Blackman, Decoded Ops. Based in Worthing, West Sussex, working across the UK.

Career arc · DO-ART-831

Three vantage points, one problem that never changed.

Twenty-five years in print, embroidery, and decoration, from warehouse floor to IT to operations. Every level taught me the same thing: the paperwork says one thing, the floor does another, and closing that gap is the job now.

The route

How I got here

Every level of these businesses, one stop at a time.

01

Industrial computing

MOD, BBC, ITV

02

Textiles

Warehouse floor to 1,000+ orders a day at peak

03

IT managed services

04

Demystify Digital

4.5 years building eCommerce for print and embroidery

05 · What I do now

Operations consultancy

decodedops.co.uk · DO-ART-831 · Rev 01
The record

Two things worth knowing.

Fact 01

1,000+

orders a day at Christmas peak

Seven years running operations at one textile business.

We went from paper and people's memories to shipping over a thousand orders a day at Christmas peak. Full barcode scanning, ERP, proper pick, pack and despatch.

Fact 02

4½ years

running my own eCommerce agency, Demystify Digital

Building it taught me where the real problem was.

I built a full print and embroidery ecommerce ecosystem on Magento 2 for clients across the sector. Most of the enquiries that came in as a website problem turned out to be an operations problem underneath, and that's what pulled me into consultancy.

DO-ART-719 · SchematicRev 03Issued
Why the software exists

I didn't set out to build software.

I kept meeting the same gap in businesses I was already fixing, and nothing on the market closed it at a price those businesses could justify. So I built the thing that did. It exists because the operational work needed it, and every feature in it has come out of a real job for a real client.

Schematic plate DO-ART-719, three ways to fill the gap. The platform you already run covers orders, stock, customers, products, accounts, suppliers, purchasing and reports, with custom development bolted on to make it fit; decoration and artwork are not built for it, leaving a gap. Three routes lead out of the gap: use what is already there; add a layer on top; or use something already built, because there was nothing on the market designed to do that job.

Works is one of those layers. At Hanicks, it has brought 317,812 supplier products into one catalogue and matched 154,518 of them to a supplier automatically. Nobody retypes a supplier spreadsheet any more.

Want to talk it through first?

A straightforward conversation about whether this is the right fit, before anything gets booked.

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