“How Cin7 saves us $130,000 a year.”

Jennifer Xidias on how Cin7’s inventory management integrations saves Peta+Jain time and hundreds of thousands of dollars, every year.

One of the most quantifiable things in my decision to go with Cin7 as my software choice was not only its futuristic focus, but also the amount we could save on our IT spend.

Most companies allocate a spend for marketing or IT improvements. We spend a lot of money on marketing. As one of Australia’s fastest-growing fashion companies, we have to keep relevant with competing brands. Unfortunately, because of Covid-19, everything was postponed.

So, when I was looking for an inventory management solution, I needed a good IT product that suited what we did and was great value for money.

Cin7 is that product. It has seriously saved us about $130k this year alone, through not having to employ extra warehouse and admin staff. And when it comes to time savings, with our Shopify, The Iconic and Starshipit integrations now operational, it saves hours every day not having to key in the data manually or create spreadsheets to import.

Over the last 12 months, orders through our own website (powered by Shopify) and the Iconic Marketplace have steadily grown, from around an average of 50 orders per week to well over 200 per week. At sale times, this can reach around 100 per day.

Before Cin7, we were manually entering the shipping details into Australia Post and Excel to create consignments and picking lists, and then updating the tracking numbers in The Iconic and Shopify. As you can see, this was extremely labour-intensive during peak volume times!

We then moved to downloading the orders and creating spreadsheets to upload into Australia Post and update the tracking numbers. This was less labour intensive, but still a time-consuming process. It would still take at least one hour of time twice a day for the warehouse to just do the paperwork. The other downside of this system was that someone would generally have to then key all of the Shopify and The Iconic orders into MYOB to remove the stock and record the sale. This could then take at least another hour of time per day or if 100 orders, several hours.

The last issue that we had was that we would then have to remove The Iconic invoices every two weeks, and re-key their invoice to align with the actual statement from The Iconic, so that our records matched with what we were getting paid.

Our Cin7 implementation has removed all these issues. With our new, automated workflow, we’re saving at least 30 hours a fortnight. Also, with Cin7 integrating directly with The Iconic, reconciling orders from that channel only requires a two-second journal, each fortnight, to take up the commission amounts as all orders and stock are automatically taken care of. This makes for an additional saving of three hours a fortnight.

As well as the colossal time saving, we’re also saving $130,000 a year on not having to hire employees to do hours of tedious work. If we hadn’t used Cin7 to integrate our systems to deal with our rapid growth, and replace those manual processes, we would have required an additional two employees (one in the warehouse, and one admin person) to assist with all of the paperwork. Shopify and The Iconic are only part of our business, and we’d still need to deal with all of the other wholesale customer orders each day, and pack and ship their orders too.

The cost of each additional employee is approximately $65k per year, which gives us a cost saving of $130k a year.

The Cin7, Iconic, Shopify and Starshipit integrations give the warehouse manager and I approximately two day’s worth of time per week to concentrate on other parts of our business, without having to get other staff. I love Cin7. I think it’s a fantastic product.