Application integration and the significance it has for inventory management software

Posted on December 6, 2022 | by Cin7 team | Leave a Comment

In today’s automated world, retail and manufacturing companies control their business processes with several different software applications, each of which performs a specific function. For instance, there are applications for accounting, supply chain management (SCM), and inventory management (IMS). While they’re separate and perform their own clearly defined tasks, it’s vitally important for them to communicate with each other and for the data they use to be passed between them. Simply put: If your SCM can’t pass its data on to your IMS, information about your stock would have to be input manually.

When these different applications are able to communicate, you have application integration.

Different ways application integration can be performed

Application integration sounds simple enough, but there are four basic ways it can take place.

Data level integration

Called data level integration, this method puts the data stored in each application into a single, separate database. This separate database is called an enterprise database or an enterprise database repository. To create this centralized system, the data stored in each individual application are extracted, cleansed, and reformatted to be consistent with whatever standard the enterprise database uses. From that point, individual applications can tap into the central system to get the data it needs.

This method is the lowest-cost application integration due to the minimal amount of programming needed to set it up and the speed with which that can be done. Data level integration only takes the data an application stores, not the coding of the application itself.

Application interface level

Known as application interface level, this method doesn’t have a centralized database that stores everything. Instead, data extracted from one application are converted into a standardized format and then loaded directly onto the target application. Hence, application to application.

Application interface level is currently the most popular method for data sharing because most application codes now provide interfaces. Cin7’s IMS, for instance, offers over 700 integrations, and new integrations are being added regularly.

Method level

Here, it’s not data that are shared, but business functions. This may sound precarious, but the actual business functions are not included in the code that’s passed along. An evolving way of exchanging data, method level is promising because it’s compatible with technologies like Java RMI, DCOM, and Cobra. A big drawback, however, is that the application code has to be changed before it can be used.

User interface

User interface (UI) is about having the different applications designed in such a way that users (human) can log on to their company’s network and bring up the data they need from any computer in the network. Application codes don’t have to be changed for this method to work – a factor that makes the cost minimal – but that also gives it less flexibility.

Benefits of application integration for inventory management software

When it comes to inventory management, application integration is essential. Having the ability to input data from other applications into IMS software or passing the data it stores into another system, and being able to do so accurately and quickly, is vital to business operations. The benefits are:

Inventory optimization

Inventory optimization, or having the right amount of inventory, means carrying enough to fill orders and prevent stockouts, while not having too much of it.

If your inventory management software is integrated with accounting and ecommerce applications, you’ll have a clear idea of the quantity of items you should be warehousing as well as information about which actual items you should stock. You’ll also be alerted when you need to reorder. This means less worry about overstocking or understocking.

Making good financial decisions

Information about how well certain goods have sold in the past and predictions about how well they’re expected to do going forward informs decisions that are made in the present. In order to get this information, reports and forecasts have to be accessed from several applications in real time.

When this information is available to IMS systems, better decisions can be made about which stock to carry. Additionally, application integration with a variety of systems makes audits more accurate. You’ll be able to verify that the stock listed in your books is a real reflection of the goods you have in storage, and you’ll have complete information about items that are in transit.

Types of integrations available on Cin7

There are more than 700 integrations in Cin7’s software, but they can be categorized into the following business operations:

Accounting apps

Accounting software records and manages your financial transactions, everything from purchases and sales to operating costs and payroll. Cin7’s system can integrate popular accounting software like QuickBooks Online, Xero, and QuickBooks.

Ecommerce platforms

Cin7 can integrate with ecommerce platforms that include Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify, and others. If you’re selling through any one of them, IMS integration will give you oversight and let you know how your sales are going. If you’re selling items through more than one of these ecommerce platforms, Cin7 will allow you to integrate their data and accounts into a single platform on your system.

EDI retailers

Electronic data interchange (EDI) is the system through which documents like invoices and purchase orders are transferred electronically. There are several electronic standards to choose from for these exchanges, but whichever one is used, both sender and receiver have to be using the same one. Cin7 can facilitate most of them. Some larger retailers like Scheels, Sears, Sephora and Walmart have their own EDI systems, and Cin7 can be synced with them also.

EDI suppliers

EDI suppliers are organizations that provide EDI-compatible solutions and technologies to other companies. Two of the leading suppliers are Synnex and Tech Data, and Cin7 can integrate seamlessly with both.

Marketplaces

If the website you’re selling your goods through is charging you commission for each sale, you’re on a marketplace. Marketplaces are a good way to get your product out and make a name for yourself, especially if you have a new company or are small in size. To keep on top of your business in these marketplaces, you’re going to have to integrate them with your inventory management system. Cin7 can do this for all the major marketplaces, including Amazon, Etsy, Iconic, and eBay.

Payment gateways

When you sell online, you need a payment gateway to process payments. You also need to integrate this payment gateway with your IMS. More than just getting paid for your goods, integration with your IMS streamlines their flow and ensures you have enough in stock. To make this easy, Cin7 can integrate with payment interfaces like PayPal, Dejavoo, EVO Payments, and others.

Sales and marketing

Sales and marketing software uses technology to get your advertising to the right audience. That means customizing and posting it on social media and other pertinent sites. To facilitate this, Cin7 inventory management software integrates with Customer Relations Systems (CRMs) such as Salesforce, Mailchimp, Senter, and HubSpot.

Shipping

The very nature of ecommerce involves shipping. Goods that are purchased online have to be physically transported to their buyers. If you hire a third-party to take care of this shipping, you still have to keep track of the items and maintain your records. Cin7’s software can integrate with shipping partners Shippit, GoSweetSpot, Shiptheory and many others, ensuring you’ll always have the information you need at your fingertips.

Supply chain planning

The supply chain covers every step in the fulfillment/manufacturing process from purchasing and inventory management to sales and deliveries. To organize all this in the best possible way, Cin7 integrates with supply chain planning apps like StockTrim, Streamline, and Easy Insight.

Third-party connectors

Sometimes a company uses another organization, a third party, to provide the application integration software (API) that allows different applications to speak to each other. To enable this, Cin7 can communicate with Syncware, Hyperspace HQ, and Pipe17.

Third-party logistics

Logistics is the physical act of moving items and people from one area of a business to another. If you’re parceling out your warehousing and transportation to another company, you’re using third-party, or 3PL logistics. Some of the companies that provide 3PL include JAS, JD Smith, Quiet Logistics, and Ship Depot. Cin7 lets you integrate your systems with any one of them.

Winding up

In summary, application integration refers to the process of connecting two or more applications so that the data each holds can be exchanged. When it comes to IMS systems, this ability to share data makes the entire inventory side of the business operate efficiently, and ensures that there’s enough of it all times in the right quantities.

Cin7’s inventory management software lets you integrate with all the relevant apps, making sure you have all the information you need to keep your inventory at optimum levels.

If you want to learn more about Cin7, book a demo by clicking here.

Lockabox®

Like a lot of the best product ideas, Lockabox® grew out of a simple day-to-day frustration.

When he was living with hungry roommates, founder Peter Morris found himself asking that question a lot more than he’d have liked. After a long night, Peter would wake up and shuffle to the refrigerator looking for a slice of last night’s pizza for breakfast — only to find that someone had gotten there before him.

“Who stole my lunch?”

The solution Peter came up with was simple: a combination of a simple three-digit combination lock with strong polycarbonate construction. In short, a lockable storage container. Manufactured in the UK, these portable, lightweight boxes are today used for much more than food storage. Their primary product, Lockabox One®, is used by elder care facilities to store patient medications, and office admins are putting desk sensors in Lockaboxes® to gauge office traffic and optimize floor plans.

With annual sales of £2M GBP, Lockabox® expects to grow from a small product seller into a major player by investing in R&D over the next 12 months and expanding the Lockabox® product range. They’re moving from success to success — all with the help of Cin7.

Cin7 and Xero provide a single source of truth

Lockabox® Operations Specialist Rory Fitz-Gerald says he’s “relieved” to have put Cin7 into action in early 2021, especially as the company creates new SKUs and sales increase. Their old system, Rory, says, simply wasn’t up to the task.

“Our previous system was very inaccurate. We could never really trust the information we were working with,” Rory says. “I feel like we can trust what Cin7 is telling us on stock. Which obviously, for a small business like ours, is quite a big advantage.”

Lockabox® relies on Cin7 to help them to reconcile their weekly inventory counts (stocktakes). Without Cin7, coordinating stock between 10 warehouses across the globe could be an incredibly complex task. Luckily, Cin7 makes everything much simpler. Rory easily runs weekly stock and sales reports from Cin7 to facilitate stock audits and reconcile any discrepancies. He says the software acts as the single source of truth against which he can compare manual counts, and that Cin7 on side, Lockabox® needs far fewer people than it would otherwise need to manage operations.

The efficiency boost from Cin7 is multiplied by its powerful integration with Xero accounting software, with invoicing and sales data shared between Xero and Cin7 in real-time.

“Cin7 gives us that extra accountability because all sales go through it,” Rory says. “With the reporting coming out of it too, we know where stock has gone, and we can better manage distribution.”

On the B2B side of the business, Rory credits Cin7 for expediting wholesale orders. Once a quote is generated, “having the ‘accept now’ button on the quote automatically flips the quote to a sales order, so our wholesale customer can make immediate payment.”

Cin7 helps avoid financial setbacks

Lockabox® leverages Cin7 to manage their multiple Amazon and WooCommerce sales channels, as well as third-party logistics (3PL) and fourth-party logistics (4PL) partners who are directly integrated with Cin7. The system proved its value when the operations team suffered a mishap that could easily have become a costly catastrophe.

One of Lockabox’s® 4PL partners failed to log a shipment of 700 units with a retail value of £30,000. Fortunately, Cin7 exposed the discrepancy during a weekly reconciliation, and Rory was able to investigate and determine what had happened.

Without Cin7, Rory explains, the operations team would have assumed that the warehouse had 700 more SKUs of one particular product than was actually being held. The warehouse would have run out of stock prematurely and Lockabox® would have suffered a temporary outage of product to sell.

“Cin7 is our failsafe system,” says Rory. “We were able to pin the 3PL to the wall and say ‘no, our stock numbers are correct – you have made the mistake.’ Having Cin7 alongside gives us the ability to keep accurate branch transfer data to catch human errors.”

Cin7 is the key to product business growth

Lockabox® says that Cin7’s flexibility is key to the future growth of the brand, and they’re already gearing up for expansion, with the introduction of a new and improved version of Lockabox One™ Shelf Packs which help to organize and partition contents. With their expansion into accessories, Rory says the team is looking forward to leveraging Cin7’s ability to support product bundles.

Here at Cin7, we’re excited to have Lockabox® join a family of over 8,000 businesses that rely on Cin7 to manage their inventory and online sales. Lockabox® is currently building a manufacturing facility in the US, and with Cin7 as their foundation, we’re going to enjoy watching them grow.

If your business could benefit from the extraordinary inventory visibility and increased efficiency that Cin7 brings, don’t miss out — book a demo with one of our brilliant sales staff today.

"Cin7 is our failsafe system"

Rory Fitz-Gerald, Operations Specialist, Lockabox®

Helping LOCATE customers find a new home

Posted on September 28, 2022 | by Cin7 team | Leave a Comment

The choices for inventory and order management software are narrowing by the month. In July 2020, Square sunsetted Stitch Labs. In June 2021, Intuit/QuickBooks announced it was sunsetting its TradeGecko platform. In November of 2021, Xero announced October 10, 2022 as the date it will be sunsetting its LOCATE software.

The field of inventory software providers is undergoing a trend of consolidation because the few top full-featured players are becoming established as the solutions of choice.

If you’ve started an ecommerce business, are in the planning stages for one, or are expanding your brick-and-mortar to include online, implementing a flexible, cloud-based, all-in-one inventory and order management system should be top of mind.

The sunsetting of LOCATE may leave you in need of another software solution for managing your inventory. If that’s the case, how would you feel about getting an online system that could do more than LOCATE? Is your business sufficiently prepared for robust growth, for instance? Cin7 is an inventory and order management solution built to position your business for growth for years to come.

There are still several options out there, even without LOCATE. How can you know which solution to choose? How do the leading providers that are left compare to each other? Which solution is best for you?

Choosing the right alternative to LOCATE

Here are some important considerations to keep in mind as you begin to research inventory control providers.

A solution that will grow with you

The software you choose should be able to keep up with the growth of your business. A good way to estimate the future growth of your business is to take the quantity of goods you’re currently selling and increase it by a reasonable growth factor each year for the next five years.

Higher complexity online sellers are adopting Cin7, which supports multichannel sales operations and boasts over 700 built-in integrations that connect to popular accounting, shipping, and 3PL providers to handle warehousing and fulfillment.

When selecting an inventory management system, you should make sure it’s completely SaaS-based. SaaS stands for Software as a Service, which essentially means it operates totally in the cloud. Some providers are not completely SaaS based, and require physical servers to be installed in each of your locations. Of course, these servers have to be maintained.

Highly configurable multichannel D2C options

We recently conducted a survey of 4,000 online sellers. We wanted to find out what strategies the most successful sellers were applying. Of the 4,000 businesses we polled, 47% rated multichannel selling as their #1 priority.

Building a variety of sales channels allows for a more agile business strategy, one that’s less vulnerable to market disruptions. Cin7’s integrated ecosystem enables multichannel selling from all of your online and physical store locations.

We even published the survey as a fact-filled eBook. It’s available for free right here.

Strengthen your supply chain

We’ve all heard about the current state of the global supply chain. Experts tell us the disruption may not be resolved until 2024 or beyond. This underscores the importance of choosing a software provider with the richest feature set for the price to mitigate the impact of supply chain disruption wherever possible.

Compared to competitors, Cin7 comes out way ahead when it comes to feature depth. As your business grows, the ability to connect directly to major retailers via built-in EDI simplifies bulk orders and payment processing. Cin7 seamlessly connects inventory and order management to point of sale, online marketplaces, accounting software, shipping, and 3PL providers. It also includes a warehouse management system.

When it comes to integrations, no other solution can beat Cin7. With over 700 built-in connections, Cin7 creates a centralized network of real-time 360° visibility across your business and builds efficiencies in finance, order fulfillment, EDI, and 3PL.

Cin7 immediately syncs all sales and purchasing transactions with popular accounting software like QuickBooks and Xero.

When it comes to financial analysis and reporting, Cin7 boasts extensively configurable reporting analytics including pivot table-based reports to help with sales analysis and inventory forecasting.

B2B and Wholesale

Cin7 ensures you can handle inventory control, sales, purchasing, order fulfillment and payment processing for B2B orders. Cin7 includes a configurable payment portal that allows you to set payment terms, take wholesale order deposits of any amount, and process all payments.

Cost

Cin7 is priced in the mid hundreds, includes multiple users, and connections to third parties in the monthly subscription fee. Most other solutions require middleware providers to create connections and charge a recurring monthly fee per connection.

With the number of connections required to run your business, it’s financially wise to go with a provider that has already built direct connections to the leading third parties you’re going to need to work with and includes them in your monthly fees.

Don’t delay researching

October 10, 2022 is just around the corner. If you’re a growing product seller and multiple sales channels is your goal, book a demo here. One of our Cin7 sales specialists will help you find out if Cin7 is a fit for your growing business.

Big Music

When Richard Berkman started Big Music with his brother David back in 2009, they did it because they wanted to do something that they were passionate about, instead of a job that just paid the bills.

“My brother was a passionate musician, and we had this idea to create a one-stop-shop where you could buy an instrument, learn to play it, perform, even record, all under the one roof,” Richard says.

He and his brother looked everywhere for businesses following a similar approach, but couldn’t find many overseas, and there were none at all in Australia.

“We asked why, and the music stores said, ‘We know nothing about running a lessons business,’ and the music schools said ‘We know nothing about running a retail store.’ But we were stupid enough to try to do both at once,” Richard chuckles. “For our sins, we broke all the rules.”

If they’d have known better, they might have never started. But 12 years and “a hell of a lot of mistakes,” later Big Music is still here, and the business keeps the brothers busy. They have over 800 students come in for music lessons in the Big Music studios, they have 30 music teachers working six or seven days a week, teaching children and adults, and they’ve got a music product business that sells both online and in their Sydney street-front retail premises.

Prior to 2020, the business had matured and was running well — and everyone knows what happened next.

Covid pause causes pandemonium

The Covid-19 pandemic laid waste to many retail businesses. Lockdowns hit first, then when rules relaxed, the ongoing pandemic saw people understandably reluctant to return to packed stores. But, for many product companies, the slump in foot traffic was more than made up for by a surge in eCommerce. Companies that were in a place to take advantage of the conditions often did more thriving than mere surviving.

“Prior to Covid, our eCommerce business was around 25 percent of total sales,” Richard says. “And now… it’s hard to tell because it’s still settling down, but I think it’ll end up being more like 35 to 40 percent.”

The music business has some unique caveats that makes online selling potentially problematic. It’s not like, for example, a shoe shop, where products tend to be similarly priced. Music products have a huge price range — something as simple as a guitar pick can be picked up for less than $2, whereas a custom Fender Stratocaster guitar can sell for more than $10,000. Some purchases are impulse buys, where others are much more considered, like buying a car.

“So our sales people are sometimes like a checkout person at a grocery store, and other times they’re like a car salesperson,” Richard says.

“We needed to find systems that could handle both — allow us to have a certain volume of very small transactions, where there’s not a big customer relationship component, and then maybe half a dozen times a day there’s going to a much more considered transaction where we could be giving people quotes, they’re going away and thinking about it, and then when they purchase you’re adding on all this other stuff and bundling it.”

Big Music had long used an inventory management system called Lightspeed to handle Big Music’s unique requirements. Over the years, they’d customized it to fit the business, and their staff were all used to it. But with the increase in their eCommerce sales volume, and the modernization and cloud trend in the business software landscape, they found themselves outgrowing Lightspeed.

When Lightspeed announced it was winding down, Big Music needed something bigger and better, and to implement it, they turned to the people who’d helped them get Lightspeed up and running over a decade ago — SMB Consultants.

Time for a tune-up

Richard had known Jeff and Peter at SMB before Big Music even existed, so he knew they were the sort of people who’d be able to help them implement an inventory system that was just right for Big Music. He’d taken note of business software trends, where systems are built to do one thing well — like Xero for accounting — but also have open APIs and software endpoints that allow different apps to share data and talk with each other.

“You now have this modular approach, where you take the best apps and put them together to give you a customized solution,” Richard says. “And Jeff and his team had worked that out a long time before a lot of other people did. They’ve now helped hundreds of businesses navigate down that particular pathway, and that’s a profound change from 10 or 12 years ago where you chose one system that would do everything.”

A decade ago, Big Music had settled for just such an approach. They ran the business on Lightspeed and MYOB, both of which were run out of a server on-premises. “It was costing us a lot of money to maintain a server room, have network consultants come out and maintain the servers, do backups, and that sort of stuff. And it didn’t make sense given the whole world’s been moving to the cloud, and I figured we could save some money if we did too,” Richard says.

However, the process of changing business-critical software can be fraught. Without the right solution and a well-planned implementation, there can be significant adverse business impacts. SMB Consultants knows this very well, which is why they have a careful, staged approach to recommending software, and implementing it.

“With any Lightspeed client, the software is so heavily ingrained in the business. It’s like their operating system, and that means change management really comes into it, because the staff will be used to the Lightspeed way of doing things,” says Jeff Atizado, co-founder of SMB Consultants. “As a business owner myself, there’s got to be careful consideration going through the process, understanding the workflows, understanding the options, and making informed decisions as you go.”

Richard agrees. “They’re big projects, and an awful lot can go wrong. That’s why working with a mob like SMB was so critical — as soon as they were engaged, my confidence level that we could do a good job improved dramatically.”

With the right experts brought on board to help, Big Music was ready for a new approach — choosing a cloud-powered app stack to act as a fully-bespoke ERP, with a single app at its core, acting as a sole source of truth. For this, they chose Cin7.

Singing from the same song sheet

When Big Music made the move to Cin7, they also opted to switch from desktop-based MYOB to online accounting with Xero. They wanted their move to the cloud to be complete, with all the benefits that being cloud-based entails. Inventory data was cleaned up and carefully moved from Lightspeed into Cin7, and the same process took place from MYOB to Xero. This meant that vital historical data was kept intact, and helped maintain business continuity across the transition.

With the implementation is complete across all of Big Music’s different software packages, the difference is night and day.

“The integration between Cin7 and Xero has been a significant enabler of a whole bunch of improvements,” Richard says. “The first is that our server room has been decommissioned, and I don’t have to spend as much money or worry about supporting that infrastructure. That’s been a blessing in itself. Not only that, but Lightspeed was holding us back, because it won’t run on certain operating systems.”

Now that the business is running on modern cloud technology, Big Music is able to be completely up-to-date with operating systems and security patches. “Our whole environment is safer and more secure than before,” Richard says. “Uptime has been over 99 percent.”

Big Music are using Cin7’s built-in Point Of Sale capability for all their in-store transactions, and it’s been working seamlessly. The near instant sync with inventory means they always know exactly how much product they have to hand, so customers aren’t kept waiting.

“The POS system works fine!” Richard says. “When you’re putting through dozens and dozens of little transactions each day, the POS system handles that beautifully. And the guys in the shop reckon it’s actually easier to use.”

Because of the high disparity in musical product pricing, Richard’s staff have to be jacks-of-all-trades, working the retail floor one moment, then negotiating a high-value purchase. Big Music is an all-in-one location, with the retail storefront, and a warehouse up back, plus studios and other areas for learning and recording. Both retail and online orders are fulfilled from the same warehouse. The website is built on Shopify, and the team uses Starshipit for fulfillment.

“Our guys jump between the POS system and the backend,” Richard says. “When you’re selling a $10,000 guitar you’ve got to get into discussions about discounts and margins and all of that information is in Cin7, but it hasn’t been an issue for my team to navigate between that and the POS.”

Richard also cites the cloud capability of Cin7 as having extended his access to the business — even when staff are offsite. “Cin7 was particularly handy during COVID,” he says. “Without it, we’d have been stuffed. Our operations and warehouse manager wasn’t able to physically come into work, but he could log on from home every day and do his job in Cin7, from home.”

With Cin7 in the cloud, the back-office can be anywhere

The new system has also created a better work-life balance for back-office staff. “Cin7 enables a more flexible approach to our workforce,” Richard says. “Our bookkeeper Diane moved cities a few months ago, and she didn’t have to resign or anything, because she can access Cin7 and Xero from Brisbane, just as well as she can operate from here. That’s the future, isn’t it? That wouldn’t have been possible in the old Lightspeed and MYOB world.”

As the business owner, Richard says the system has allowed more oversight while reducing the amount of time he needs to spend poring over reports. “I love the fact I can login from home on a Saturday or Sunday evening, and see how the store’s been trading during the day,” he says. “Having the real-time information available from anywhere is great for me.”

For Big Music’s bookkeeper (working from another city!) the level of data available has been a revelation. The depth of the integration has also removed a lot of manual effort, with operations staff all getting more data and working more efficiently than before.

“Cin7’s integration with Xero means that our bookkeeper can get a lot more information, down to the product level, when doing things like supplier reconciliations,” Richard says. “That information never existed in MYOB, so that makes her job a hell of a lot easier. I also love the pivot table functionality in Cin7 reporting, and I use that quite a lot when I’m doing analysis. It’s a lot nicer to be able to do it natively in Cin7, rather than exporting and doing it in Excel.”

Stock-taking and inventory reconciliation is a song with Cin7

Stock-taking — the perennial bugbear of any retailer — has been made much, much easier thanks to Cin7. “It used to drive me insane because the Lightspeed stock-take module was buggy, and not transparent. By contrast, going through the stock-take process in Cin7 is much easier to manage, because you can break it down into components, and execute a section or a brand or a range of things at a time.”

The difference between then and now, when it comes to stock-take, is night and day. In fact, it’s an entire weekend’s worth of days. The Big Music team used to have to do a store-wide stock take once a year, but now they can do a rolling inventory reconciliation that doesn’t require shutting down for a day or more, or coming in on a weekend. “We had to do a massive store-wide stock-take once a year, which everyone hated,” Richard says. “We don’t have to do that anymore.”

Furthermore, Cin7 has made the process of taking sales orders and converting them to purchase orders much easier. A lot of Big Music’s online orders are for items they don’t actually stock in their own warehouse. Cin7 has enabled drop-shipping, even for very complex or expensive orders. “We can knock the purchase order conversion very quickly and seamlessly,” Richard says.

Everything working together in harmony

For businesses considering adopting a cloud inventory management solution, Richard is happy to recommend Cin7 — but he’s adamant that the process is much easier all around when you’ve got expert help.

“I’ll go so far to say, well, I cannot imagine having got through this project any other way and without the help of these two blokes and the rest of their team,” Richard says. “Don’t try and do it yourself. I think that SMB have got a unique set of skills and a deep understanding, and we needed it.”

Now that Cin7 serves as Big Music’s source of truth and center of operations, things have never been better. “It works. It’s a good, reliable platform. It connects well with other apps, and you’re future-proofing your business by taking this kind of modular ecosystem approach,” Richard says.

With Cin7, I love the fact I can login from home on a Saturday or Sunday evening, and see how the store’s been trading during the day. Having the real-time information available from anywhere is great for me

Richard Berkman, Co-Founder, Big Music

Heritage Building Centre

Heritage and SMB Consultants unlock incredible growth — thanks to Cin7

After a long trial with other, less able inventory management apps, Bill Rendell and Heritage Building found a happy home in Cin7

Heritage Building has a long, storied history. When former accountant Bill Rendell first bought the business, it was simply a supplier of recycled timber, and it was doing pretty well on that basis.

But Bill had the foresight to start selling other building materials, like doors, windows, light fittings, bathroomware — “You name it,” says Bill. “We set ourselves up to be the one-stop-shop for the heritage building industry, and started selling equivalent-new reproductions as well.”

This transformation happened fairly early in the business’s story, and at first Bill used MYOB and spreadsheets to manage the complex inventory requirements of a second-hand goods business, where nearly every item sold was in some way unique. Unfortunately, it didn’t work very well. “With MYOB, there was no accountability for stock. It was just like a big box that you chucked all the information in — but I didn’t think there was anything better around at the time.”

After struggling with MYOB for almost nine years, Bill turned to what was then a new business in the very new industry of cloud software implementation and coaching — SMB Consultants.

SMB founder Jeff Atizado and his team helped set Heritage Building up with his first inventory management solution: Lightspeed. At the time, it was best-of-breed software, and the new fully-digital way of operating was revelatory for Bill’s business. But times change. The second-hand market was becoming less and less viable, and growth was stymied by the need to keep on top of manual tasks and fixing errors. “We were doing nothing but fixing stuff-ups,” Bill says.

The problem, Bill says, was that Lightspeed hadn’t moved fast enough to keep up with the rest of the rapidly-changing world of online business.

“It’s very difficult to get Lightspeed to work with Shopify,” says Bill. “We couldn’t get the shipping set up the way we wanted it. It just wasn’t possible with that program.

He turned to his trusted advisors to help turn things around. “I started speaking with Jeff about using Cin7. The more I heard about it, the more I was impressed with what it could do.”

SMB lends a hand for the second time

“It was interesting for us, because even though Bill had been a customer for eight years, the second time around is an excellent opportunity to re-evaluate their requirements and build a solution that incorporates what is important to them today. It simply isn’t just a process of replacing old with new. Businesses grow and change and you need to take the time to understand what are the new objectives,” says Jeff Atizado.

Since their first engagement with Heritage Buildings, SMB Consultants have developed a process to deeply understand the business they’re working with. How is the business changing? How has it evolved? And where does it want to go?

Together, Bill and the SMB team found that a new software solution could help him exit the secondhand goods market altogether, while growing his business in entirely new directions.

“That process at the beginning of the project, to understand how we were working, was critical,” Bill says. “Back when we first started with SMB and Lightspeed, that process didn’t exist! Doing the scoping showed me an entirely different SMB, and following the process all the way through to implement Cin7 has proved it out. They understood what we needed, and made sure it happened.”

After the initial consultation, SMB Consultants used Cin7 to create a working proof-of-concept, to introduce Heritage Buildings to new workflows and opportunities offered by the software. Once the proof-of-concept was finalized, SMB worked with Bill and his team to implement the full project.

Building back better on a strong foundation

Today, Bill has transformed his business from one that physically stored and moved a lot of second-hand goods to a modern, just-in-time purchasing model that doesn’t require carrying a lot of stock. This shift, SMB says, simply wouldn’t have been possible without Cin7.

“Some big wins from Cin7 have been being able to give Bill a tool that allows him to track which items need to be ordered, and that allows him to keep track of online sales, to order quickly, and get them shipped in time,” Jeff says. “One one side, the purchasing, on the other, fulfillment.”

Under the old system, it took up to two or three weeks for Heritage Building to get goods to their customers. But now they can get goods into customer hands in less than a week. Cin7’s ability to support a dropshipping model has enabled Heritage Building to reduce its total stock holding by a factor of more than four, with a huge accompanying reduction in administration requirements while improving shipping times.

“Our stock holding at present is about 200,000. Our stock holding was 1.5 million with half the turnover we’re doing now , and we’re doing it better. We’ve basically reinvented ourselves from the ground up, and we’re now a very viable online shop as well,” Bill says.

“With shipping, what we’ve achieved now was beyond anything we could conceive. We’ve reduced our turnaround time for orders from about two weeks per item, down to three to five days.”

Soon, with new shipping workflows they’re looking to create with SMB in Cin7, he reckons they’ll be able to use Cin7 to make shipping even faster.

“One of the things we’re doing now is looking to integrate with his dropship fulfillment provider, so we can streamline how quickly we can get orders from them, which will again cut down the amount of time it takes to get the product into a customer’s hands,” Jeff says.

As well as pivoting from second-hand goods to a thriving multichannel business selling new materials, Cin7 has allowed Bill to branch out with a hot new sideline — selling fireplaces.

“It’s going gangbusters,” Bill says. “Again, that’s because of the website, and the website is because of Cin7.” Having a modern inventory app like Cin7 as their foundation means that it’s easy to sync with best-of-breed ecommerce apps like Shopify.

“We’ve basically got a direct connection between Cin7 and Shopify,” Bill says. “We can move the products back and forwards, we can adjust counts. No drama. No chance of an error. That’s brilliant.”

“We can plug a lot of apps into Cin7. Lightspeed couldn’t do that.”

“A winning combination”

Heritage Building, SMB Consultants, and Cin7 have been a winning combination. Anytime he’s needed help, SMB has been there for support. Bill has his own specialist implementation partner at SMB, Jess, who’s helped all through the scoping and setup, and can now lend a hand whenever Bill needs it. “I’ve still got Jessica there, when I need her, whether it’s a big or a little thing. You can’t hire for that — well, I don’t think you can,” Bill says.

Likewise, Jeff says that their work with Heritage Buildings is a great showcase of how beneficial it can be for businesses to have a long-time software and coaching partner – for both parties.

“It’s been a pleasure working with Bill,” Jeff says. “It’s great being able to look back and see the changes that we’ve made. I think Bill is being a bit humble, knowing how much change he’s actually made, but when you look at how much inventory and overhead he’s reduced, while increasing sales — that’s a winning recipe. It’s been great to be able to grow together.”

Heritage Buildings had great results the first time they worked with SMB, but the second time around, with the transformation powered by Cin7, things are better by an order of magnitude.

“The difference between two years ago and now — it’s almost unrecognizable,” Bill says. “I can work anywhere I need to be. For me, that’s a lot of help.”

The new efficiencies offered by an inventory solution that connects seamlessly with other business-critical apps have paid enormous dividends for the business. After 17 years in business, growth has been unlocked.

“In the past two years, we’ve doubled our business,” Bill says. “We’ve gone from an average of about 250,000 per month to about half a million per month. And about half of that growth is our online shop. We’ve been increasing turnover every month for the last two years, and we’re now the number three distributor in our category in Australia.”

None of it would have been possible without Cin7 — and the help they’ve received from SMB Consultants.

“Without Cin7, it would have been impossible to do what we’ve achieved,” Bill says. “It’s that simple. We are who we are today because of Cin7 and SMB Consultants. Our website is going exceptionally well, and I don’t think it would have been possible before Cin7. It’s worked very well for us.”

What we've achieved with Cin7 was beyond anything we could conceive. We’ve reduced our turnaround time for orders from about two weeks per item, down to three to five days.

Bill Rendell, Director, Heritage Building

Cost of goods sold and how to calculate it

Posted on June 23, 2022 | by Cin7 team | Leave a Comment

Cost Of Goods Sold (COGS) is a common accounting term or simply called COGS when you meet with your accountant or at a corporate meeting.

If you’ve ever wondered what it is and why it is so important then this article is for you.

Let’s first understand the term cost of goods sold.

What is the cost of goods sold?

COGS is the value of the inventory that has been sold by a business.

It is only recognized upon sale of inventory and is reported in the financial period in which those sales occur.

The value of inventory is the total of the direct cost of the products making up that inventory, which has either been produced or purchased by a company for resale. It includes additional charges directly related to preparing products ready for sale, like packaging and delivery charges. However, it excludes indirect expenses such as sales & marketing.

Therefore, COGS equal the direct cost related to the production of or purchase of products sold.

Keep in mind that the value of inventory on hand is considered an asset until the inventory is sold.

Why is it important to calculate the cost of COGS?

The primary motive of starting any business is to earn a profit. A business can ensure that it earns a profit by knowing the exact income and expenses incurred to sell its products.

COGS inform a business about all the direct expenditures incurred in getting products ready for sale. Therefore, COGS are an important part of the business decision making process.

Here are some of the benefits of calculating COGS:

1. Helps create a pricing strategy

Firstly, your selling price can be determined by knowing the total direct costs you have incurred in producing or procuring products. Once you know these costs, you will be in a better position to judge the price at which to sell products so that you can cover your indirect expenses and also earn a profit from the sale.

Knowing COGS helps you determine how much of a profit margin you can keep on the products you sell.

2. Helps determine the total expenses incurred in selling products

Your profit and loss statement needs to list all your income and expenditures. By taking the direct costs you have spent in acquiring stock, you can arrive at the total expenses incurred by including other indirect expenses such as overhead costs like sales and marketing.

3. Compare the market value of your product with your competitors

Determining profit margin by only considering direct costs incurred is an incomplete picture. Chances are that your prices may be higher than your competitors in the market. In such a situation, fewer customers will purchase your products and you will incur a loss. If your prices are lower than your competitors, then you can still incur a loss since your low profit margin might not cover your indirect expenses.

COGS helps you to sell your product at a competitive price, grow sales and by extension, earn profits.

Now that you know the importance of calculating COGS, let’s learn the formula to calculate COGS.

How to calculate COGS

Here’s the formula to derive COGS:

COGS = Beginning Inventory + Purchases made during the period – Ending Inventory

To calculate the COGS for a reporting period, start with the value of the beginning inventory. If additional inventory was added during the reporting period, be sure to add the value of any new inventory that is produced or purchased to the value of the existing stock. Now, subtract the value of ending inventory from COGS sold for that reporting period.

Note, that this is a basic example and does not take into account items like returns, discounts, obsolete stock, and the inventory valuation method used.

Example of COGS

Let’s assume that company X uses the calendar year to record their inventory. The beginning inventory value was recorded on the 1st of January and the ending inventory value was recorded on 31st of December.

The beginning inventory value was $20,000. During the year, the retailer realized that the business would sell more than the inventory received earlier in the year, so additional inventory worth $7,000. was purchased. At the end of the calendar year, the ending inventory value was worth $4,000.

Now, let’s work out the COGS for the entire year by using the formula.

COGS = Beginning Inventory + Purchases made during the period – Ending inventory

COGS = $20,000. + $7,000. – $4,000.

Therefore, COGS = $23,000.

The COGS equals $23,000, as calculated. Use this formula to help with production, purchasing, and pricing decisions.

Calculating COGS can also help you to calculate your profit for a reporting period and help with decisions to ensure that indirect costs are covered.

Suppose your revenue is $75,000 in a reporting period.

Knowing the COGS, your profit will be $75,000. – $23,000. = $52,000.

COGS – Key business takeaways

The COGS formula can be used at an individual product level to help with decision making prior to producing, procuring, and selling that product.
The COGS for a reporting period is the total of COGS for all product sales for that reporting period. It is a vital metric that is included in your financial statements and is used to calculate your gross profit for that reporting period. Gross profit is a profitability measure that shows how well a business can cover its indirect expenses and earn a profit.
The value of COGS will always depend on the direct costs of the products sold and the inventory valuation method used by the business.

Closing remarks

A cloud-based inventory and order management system that has been designed to integrate bi-directionally with your accounting software is key to keeping a close and accurate view of sales performance. Cin7 offers access to real time inventory levels and associated financials that make it easier for product sellers to feel confident that they are earning a healthy profit margin.

To learn how Cin7 can modernize your operations, book a call with one of our experts.

7 considerations for EDI success

Posted on June 20, 2022 | by Cin7 team | Leave a Comment

Technology has drastically improved how we interact with the world. Transportation has evolved from animal carts to fast cars; data transmission has changed from postal letters to instant emails. With the advent of the Internet, the world has turned into a connected village.

In such a connected world, your business needs to be able to share relevant information with stakeholders like suppliers. Thanks to technology, this process can be streamlined using EDI. You can electronically share information about purchase orders, invoices, and status information with your stakeholders using EDI.

In this article, we will discuss what EDI means and what challenges you may face while using EDI for your business. Let’s get started.

What is EDI?

EDI stands for Electronic Data Interchange, and it facilitates the computer-to-computer data transfer between two (or more) parties. In layman’s terms, EDI is similar to a chat messenger that delivers information from your device to your friend’s device.

The parties that exchange information through EDI are EDI trading partners. EDI software allows its users to create templates so that they can standardize documents shared with EDI trading partners.

Suppose you integrate EDI with your ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) tool or inventory management system (IMS). Once complete, your EDI can automatically fetch the necessary documents from the ERP/IMS database and send it to trading partners as required. This way, you do not have to create documents from scratch.

In the absence of EDI, businesses had to rely on the postal service, faxing, or email all of which had drawbacks. Let us understand EDI better with the help of an example.

John runs an apparel business, and he replenishes the inventory by ordering goods from David – the manufacturer. In the past, his purchase manager would draft a purchase order, print it, and then postal mail to David to reorder stock. The order would be received by David’s sales representative, who would manually enter the items being ordered along with the respective quantity into the system to finalize the sale.

The process seems lengthy and time-consuming, right? With EDI, sending information takes seconds rather than its postal counterpart – which can take days (even weeks!).

John’s purchase manager simply needs to add order information – product specification, quantity – in his EDI software, which will be automatically forwarded to David’s (manufacturer) EDI software. David can easily integrate the EDI tool with his order management system, such that an order can be directly placed when John sends a purchase request through EDI.

Credit

It is evident that EDI can streamline the purchase process which is better than doing it manually. The manual process also has room for many errors; for starters, the sales representative can enter incorrect order quantities into the system.

EDI not only saves your processing time, but it also helps in boosting the accuracy as it minimizes human error.

EDI also brings labor cost savings, as you do not need to incur the charges of printing the order details and the cost of postal handling/faxing/email the documents. Even the recipient does not need to endure the hassle of sorting and storing the physical copies for the record.

Common EDI challenges

Now that we are clear about the use and benefits of EDI let us also discuss the challenges faced while implementing EDI.

#1 Compatibility with trading partners

Deciding to implement an EDI system involves revamping your database. This challenge can multiply if you choose to create and administer the EDI in-house. Even after successful implementation from your end, the challenges do not end.

As EDI facilitates the transactions between trading partners in real-time, it is essential that your EDI system successfully synchronizes with their system for accurate data transfer.

Another hurdle could be that some of your suppliers may not be so keen to implement an EDI due to a lack of knowledge and hesitation about data sharing.

Apart from the stakeholders, it is also essential to train your internal staff to work with the EDI system. You do not want your purchase manager to order 1,000 items instead of 100 accidentally! The repercussions of mistakes can be huge, and thus it makes sense to fully acquaint your employees with the relevant features of the EDI.

As the stakes are high, it is advisable to consult an EDI expert rather than trying to figure things out on your own.

#2 Standardized formatting

The complexity of EDI integration can be challenging when your trading partners customize the formatting guidelines to cater to their unique needs. For instance, the invoicing transaction code is referred to as EDI 810.

Some invoice fields are common across all trading partners. However, the partner may likely add some additional EDI segments specific to their business.

In such scenarios, compatibility can be an issue that can lead to transaction errors. Here the experience and support of EDI providers become crucial as they are experienced with handling such issues.

While doing B2G (Business-to-government) transactions, your EDI should be compliant with the document formats legislated by the government. For example, Since 2020, the majority of European governments have been mandated to accept invoices electronically. Even the federal German public bodies have stopped accepting unstructured invoices – PDFs, printed documents – and only accept e-invoices.

As your business expands, it is essential to comply with government standards to avoid penalties. The standards can be region-specific – like the VDA format in the German automobile industry – or industry-wide.

These are some widely adopted standards in the EDI industry:

UN/EDIFACT (Electronic Data Interchange for Administration) was devised by the United Nations in 1987. It created standards for the syntax and structure of the messages to ensure that EDI is compatible with multi-industry transactions.
GS1 is essentially a subset of EDIFACT, and it is widely used to standardize product data. It uses GS1 identification numbers to help identify each product, location, and trading partner. The GS1 identification numbers are usually in barcode format, which can be scanned to add the physical products into the database, and movement can be tracked.

You must also ensure that your EDI can accommodate various transmission protocols such as FTP, HTTP, SFTP, and AS2. AS2 (Applicability Statement 2) has gained popularity in the retail and consumer goods industry since its adoption by Walmart. AS2 is used to transmit EDI messages quickly, safely, and cheaply!

#3 Security considerations

Despite its wide adoption across various industries, some partners may still be concerned about implementing EDI due to the nature of information sharing.

These concerns may arise from various factors such as lack of trust and risk of information leak due to security breaches. International laws can further add to the challenges by introducing legal frameworks and data protection rules.

You must ensure that the information is shared via encrypted transfer protocols. It is best to discuss your security measures with your partners, to ensure that everyone is on the same page and comfortable with your business practices.

It should be noted that the sensitivity of the information varies, like your order data may not be as sensitive as the invoices (which can contain vital billing information). You need to take extra precautions while dealing with highly sensitive data – as with healthcare customers, for example.

A value-added network (VAN) is a hosted private network that is used to offer connectivity between EDI trading partners. It acts as the gateway to sharing documents between parties – in other words; it is like a digital postal service. You need to check the security certifications of your VAN network, like ISO 27001 accreditation.

#4 Rising EDI cost

EDI helps lower your operational costs and optimizes logistics; however, you need to spend to get started. A substantial investment to purchase the necessary infrastructure – hardware and software – for EDI transactions will be required. If you decide to build an in-house EDI, you also need a dedicated IT team for its maintenance.

If your EDI implementation does not go well, it could also tarnish your reputation amongst your trading partners. Your manufacturing vendors may even penalize you for incorrect ordering as it can impact their production lines.

To lower your costs, you can outsource to a cloud-based EDI system provider. In this case, you won’t have to invest in a dedicated set-up and transactions run in the cloud, leading to cost savings.

Additionally, a provider updates the EDI automatically, so it saves you from any hassle when scaling up.

#5 Data errors

According to a study by the University of Tennessee, 60% of B2B transactions are suspended or declined due to some anomaly in the data. This makes it crucial to take necessary steps for data governance, to make the most of your EDI’s potential.

The report further suggests that 16% of the orders placed in a month contain an incorrect price and 20% of orders are for items that are either discontinued or not available in stock. Surprisingly, 8% include a duplicate purchase order.

Such situations can be dealt with by adding EDI rules that monitor transactions for variables like price differences and PO validity. This way, the system can send alerts to your team whenever a discrepancy is found.

There are times when a manufacturer needs to increase the price of a particular product. Needless to say, it is crucial to alert the buyers so that they can alter their order quantity.

For instance, the purchase manager gets a specific budget (say $100) to order a quantity of goods. Presently, the manufacturer sells each unit at $10, so the buyer can avail of ten units ($100 budget / $10).

However, if the manufacturer increases the price from $10 to $20, the purchase manager will need to reduce the quantity from ten units to five units ($100 budget / $20). But if the manufacturer does not promptly inform the buyer about the price change, it could lead to disputes and damage their relationship.

Price changes are inevitable; to solve such issues, businesses use EDI 845 – the price authorization acknowledgment document. Vendors use it to communicate price changes to resellers. EDI 845 is used primarily in the pharmaceutical industry, but manufacturers and distributors also utilize it.

As your business operations scale, so does the volume of your EDI transactions. With greater volume, it can become challenging to avoid errors or spot missing fields. Popular EDI formats such as EDIFACT were not meant for humans to comprehend, and that is why spotting errors can be tricky.

Even if you somehow manage to do that, manual error inspection is time-consuming. Thereby, automating the error detection process can help you save time and increase your profit margins.

#6 Integration with your inventory management system

EDI should be flexible to adapt to your way of doing business instead of the other way around. The technical integration should allow you to use the formats that you prefer or commonly used by your trading partners.

Many businesses already use an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system or inventory management solution to gain insights into their business processes. Look for an EDI that also integrates with your existing system so that you can directly process the EDI orders.

Instead of manually pulling the documents from EDI and then feeding them into your inventory system, you can do this in real-time by integrating them together. This helps you meet increased customer expectations.

#7 Offering transparency

As the complexities of the supply chain rise, the need for transparency between trading partners is more important than ever.

The functionality of EDI has evolved over the years. What started as a means to improve the B2B transaction process has now evolved into a tool that provides better inventory management.

You can adopt some EDI transactions that provide inventory information to boost transparency. EDI 846 can provide information about inventory levels, and EDI 214 offers buyers shipping status notifications.

With the right system, you can share alerts and notifications with your trading partners. Offering transparency ensures that information is not siloed and helps everyone to be on the same page.

Wrapping up

We live in a period where the supply chain is constantly getting disrupted by various factors – be it pandemics or political factors. During such a period, investing in technology that can help optimize your supply chain – such as EDI – seems an obvious choice.

Implementing EDI can be beneficial as it streamlines your B2B transactions and provides much-needed transparency. Choosing the right EDI that integrates with your ERP can do wonders for your organization.

Vetting the best EDI is also vital as it contains sensitive information that can affect your business’s overall profitability.

To learn more about Cin7’s built-in EDI capabilities, request a demo.

Dock & Bay

Ben Muller might be one of the world’s most notable towel enthusiasts. He’s the co-founder of Dock & Bay, a brand with a single, noble goal: create the world’s greatest quick-dry beach towel entirely from sustainably sourced materials.

The company’s founding idea was incredibly simple: to merge the concept of a compact, quick-dry travel towel with a nice, big, bright, colorful beach towel. Since then, they’ve had an incredible journey. It began with launching sales via Amazon and their own website, and — having barely reached the milestone of their first million in revenue — they had a lucrative layover at the Dragons’ Den, the UK’s cut-throat equivalent of Shark Tank.

“We had a nice little head-start in 2017 when we were on Dragons’ Den in the UK,” Ben says. “One of the dragons, Deborah Meaden, took us under their wing. It’s been a really good experience, to take the business from an idea into a bit of a startup.”

The quick wins from the Dragons’ Den appearance was a huge hit of exposure to worldwide audiences via the popular TV show. “That brand awareness gave us a real head-start to moving forward as a business, as well as some goalposts to aim for, as we expanded around the world,” Ben says. “And when we took on Deborah as an investor, she made us more accountable — we weren’t just doing a little side-project anymore, we had to be professional and respectable. It was a good kick up the bum to take things seriously and do things properly.”

One of those kicks up the bum? Dock & Bay needed to get a grip on their inventory. You could perhaps say that the problem was they didn’t know where their towels were — and they needed to find out.

Poor inventory management almost made Dock & Bay throw in the towel

“Inventory management was the most horrible part of our existence, for the entire business,” Ben says. “It was always a challenge. In the past, our warehouse owned the source of truth for inventory, and they put their numbers into our eCommerce platform. What that meant was, essentially, we didn’t have any control over what we were selling.”

Tired of using spreadsheets as a temporary fix, Dock & Bay team went shopping for an inventory management solution. Their main pain points were simple: inventory visibility, and an inability to do stock forecasting. “We didn’t have control over what inventory we had listed, because the systems around us seemed to be controlling what we were selling. The most we’d managed was Band-Aid fixes to our eCommerce platform.”

The Dock & Bay team needed help, from somebody who knew how inventory management worked and what the best systems were, and could help them get their system implementation right the first time. They found exactly what they were looking for in SMB Consultants.

SMB Consultants are Cin7 Experts. Their job is to help their clients find the best solution to grow and manage their businesses, and once that solution has been found, they work to seamlessly implement it. The foundation of their success is having a careful process that they go through with all their clients — first seeking to understand how the company is working, what the pain points are, and what changes need to be made to optimize operations.

“We originally reached out to SMB to say ‘We’ve got a problem,’” Ben says. “We knew there were a lot of inventory management programs around — TradeGecko, DEAR Systems, Cin7, and so forth. We said, ‘We don’t know which one would be best, but in general, each of these seems to do something like what we need.’”

Through a collaborative, in-depth scoping process, SMB helped Dock & Bay land on Cin7.

“SMB helped us throughout,” Ben says. “The first step was to understand how we’re operating now, and SMB have a really good view of how business operates, the challenges that businesses face, and how those solutions fit into software. When we first started talking, it wasn’t just “here’s what Cin7 does and why you should use it and we’ll install it for you” — instead, they understood the business and the challenges it faced, and they could pinpoint why Cin7 was the best solution.”

What clinched it for Cin7, Ben says, is the advanced level of integration Cin7 offers with Amazon. “It’s quite advanced compared to every other software available. All software has its own strengths and weaknesses, but Cin7 was the most well-rounded, best approach for us. SMB coached us, and their Cin7 expertise helped us understand how to implement our workflows in Cin7, and then train up our teams.”

The towel company that always knows where their inventory is

Dock & Bay have been with Cin7 for over a year, and a lot has changed.

One of the main differences is that the Dock & Bay team has fantastic inventory visibility, and confidence in their data. They no longer have to manually update convoluted, unreliable spreadsheets. Reporting is reliable, and gives decision-makers access to up-to-the-minute sales and operations information.

“The amount of data we’d have to deal with would break a spreadsheet,” Ben says. “But that’s where Cin7 comes in — we have trust in the data. And that’s the most important thing, because if you don’t trust your information, you can’t trust any reporting you try to get out of it. Cin7 gives us faith in our data, and automates the process of running reports, so we can make informed decisions.”

Cin7 now acts as the source of truth for inventory information across all the apps and platforms that Dock & Bay make use of. Sales made on Amazon and Shopify stores all pull from availability data in Cin7, and the software also looks after the routing of products in and out of their third-party logistics (3PL) warehouses.

Dock & Bay has five warehouses run by 3PL partners, one for each region they’re selling in — the UK, Canada, the US, Europe, and Australia. They also work with Amazon fulfillment in each of those regions, for a total of 10 warehouses across the business. On top of this, they also have different Shopify websites for either B2B or direct-to-consumer (D2C) sales for each region, in addition to third-party marketplaces like The Iconic and Nordstrom selling their products. This geographically disparate, multi-channel picture would be a near-impossible nightmare to manage, if not for Cin7.

“Cin7 manages the inventory in all of those warehouses,” Ben says. “It knows how many open orders there are, and that gives you your available stock. Every time an order takes place on one of our sales channels, it comes to Cin7, which knows it needs to update the other sales channels and say ‘You can’t sell this item any more.’”

Having this level of control means that Dock & Bay have been able to set up some routing rules, which simply wasn’t possible before Cin7.

“For instance, we can prevent orders going straight to the warehouse if it’s a pre-order, or if the customer hasn’t paid or is using an alternative payment method, we can set up some rules to make sure those orders don’t go out straight away — we can put in a delay of say, two hours. Being able to control that workflow really saves us a lot of time, hassle, and ultimately costs.”

Scaling up safely & sanely

Having Cin7 on their side has also given Dock & Bay something crucial: the ability to scale up safely. “Once a business hits a particular size”, Ben says, “a level of trust necessarily comes into the operations, as it’s impossible for any one person or team to check everything that happens. And if your system isn’t trustworthy, things can spiral out of control very quickly.”

“You need to trust that things are happening the way you want them to, without human intervention. Cin7 gives us the ability to create rules and automations to run the business, rather than having people do all those steps,” Ben says. “Cin7 has allowed us to grow with confidence.”

The high level of trust in their systems has been repaid with smooth operations, even over periods that typically give product companies nightmares. The Black Friday sales rush is awaited with dread anticipation by operations in the eCommerce world, with floods of consumers testing system integrity across the board. In the past, it’s been a huge bugbear for Dock & Bay. This time around, ready for anything, Ben told the support team they could call him anytime, 24/7. In the end, though, it wasn’t needed. Thanks to Cin7, Dock & Bay’s Black Friday went off without a hitch.

“In the past we had chaos, leading to weeks and weeks of issue resolution,” Ben says. “But this Black Friday we had no issues, because for the first time we had control of our data in all of our systems, and had the process down pat. I really do, 100 percent, put that down to the fact we’ve taken control of our business processes, and Cin7 is key to that.”

Customer service is now a snap

A further benefit of the Cin7 implementation has been a sharp reduction in customer service issues. Thanks to a much clearer view of inventory and more control over stock, the classic eCommerce bugbear of overselling has been almost eliminated.

“It’s reduced the number of customer service issues significantly,” Ben says. “Because we now own the information, and the process around it, we’re not overselling like we used to. The second thing is we now have a very valuable source of truth to look into where things may have gone wrong. In the past, we couldn’t really pinpoint where the issue was. Whereas now, we can analyze what happened in Cin7 and then identify where the issue is, and often even fix it ourselves.”

Ben gives a typical example of the sort of trouble they’d often face before Cin7 was implemented. If the warehouse system they were previously relying on was reporting incorrect numbers, Dock & Bay had no option but to remove the product from the website altogether. Now, they can simply adjust the stock figure in Cin7 or put a hold on the item, and that will stop the product selling across all sales channels. “Now, we can solve the problem and get on with business. That’s where Cin7’s helping us.”

Dock & Bay say that Cin7 has also saved them needing to expand the operations team. But that doesn’t mean skimping on hiring, or firing employees. Instead, they can run an efficient, high-performing, lean operation, and increase headcount in areas that will help grow the brand.

“Because we have trust in the process and the data that’s flowing through Cin7, we don’t have to intervene very often. This means our operations team can run pretty slim, and we can invest in roles like marketing and sales that add more value to the business. We’re just much more efficient,” Ben says.

Cin7 is Dock & Bay’s heart of gold and single source of truth

With the Cin7 implementation over a year behind them, Dock & Bay have a clear view of exactly how much being helped by a trusted Cin7 expert has benefited the company. The impact, Ben says, is absolutely huge, to the point where he says they “couldn’t have done it alone.”

To other businesses considering implementing Cin7, Ben says that if you’re going to be using a platform that controls so much of your business, you may as well do it properly, and get a certified Cin7 expert like SMB Consultants to help.

“SMB Consultants brought the dream to life. Having Cin7 has meant we could become more efficient, and trust the information in our systems. But we couldn’t have done that without SMB. We had to work with the right people as well as the right system to get where we are today.”

It’s safe to say that knowing exactly where their towels are has made Dock & Bay a much better business than they were before. It might seem improbable, but having Cin7 at the heart of the company makes everything possible.

“Cin7 is the heart of our business,” Ben says. “It controls what we sell, and where we sell it. It manages information from customers, through the warehouse, through our supply chain, into our accounting system, and all the way around our operations and support team. It touches every part of the business. We take all our trusted information from Cin7, and it’s our single source of truth.”

“We’d be very lost and very sad without Cin7, because there’s really no way to visualize how the business could operate without it.”

We take all our trusted information from Cin7. It’s our single source of truth

Ben Muller, Co-Founder, Dock & Bay

Here’s how digitizing your supply chain can breathe new life into your business

Posted on June 9, 2022 | by Cin7 team | Leave a Comment

Digitization has reached almost all aspects of businesses — including supply chains. New technology like embedded sensors, RFID, and GPS have helped companies transform their traditional supply chain structures into flexible, agile, open, and collaborative digital models.

In fact, according to a McKinsey survey, 93% of supply chain executives say they are actively planning to make their supply chains more resilient. And in this day and age, “resilient” means digital. Many companies are seeing the need to become more organized — and they’re doing that by regionalizing their supplies and nearshoring their processes. This type of organization ensures products don’t have to travel long (and expensive) distances.

Either way, there’s no denying that digitizing supply chains will allow these companies to improve their agility, visibility, and efficiency. Digitization allows for organizational flexibility and accelerates innovation.

Now, let’s dive into the meaning of digital supply chain management, understand how it’s different from a traditional supply chain, and explore the benefits of supply chain digitization.

What is a digital supply chain?

In a traditional supply chain, companies need to source parts and raw materials to make their product. After they understand demand for their product, companies will then find the correct sales channels and use logistics to provide customers with visibility into their orders.

A digital supply chain, in contrast, offers significantly more visibility throughout the process. The integration and application of advanced digital technologies allows customers and stakeholders to monitor supply chain operations — from procurement data and inventory management, to distribution and transportation.

For example, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) asset tracking can offer instant updates on location, including when cargo is in transit. The main goal of supply chain digitization is to enable insight for greater efficiency. This, in turn, can cut down on redundancies and greatly increase profits.

Companies with digital supply chains can move their resources, assets, people, and inventory to where they need it at any given time. Digitization helps you reduce costs by giving you the ability to respond proactively to both transportation and manufacturing risks.

The potential payoffs of any fully-realized digital supply chain include saving time, money, and resources. It will allow your company to be less wasteful and more environmentally sustainable.

Traditional vs digital supply chains

Traditional supply chains work based on historical transactional inputs, while digital supply chains function in real-time. Digital supply chains are networks, while traditional supply chains are linear. Supply chain networks communicate almost instantaneously, whereas linear supply chains move slowly and inefficiently.

Digital supply chains are also more accurate. Information from operational technology and IT systems are integrated with digital supply chain management, while traditional supply chains rely on standalone systems. When companies go digital, they can more efficiently find potential problems and predict likely risks.

Traditional supply chains rely on humans to make nearly every decision. Digital supply chains, on the other hand, have built-in automated decisions that are monitored by humans. Because of this, digital supply chains are exponentially faster.

Why your supply chain should go digital

Digitization in supply chain management empowers planning, sourcing, and logistics teams to collaborate. It also allows those teams to automate processes and leverage analytics. This type of synergy among teams drives growth, mitigates risk, and optimizes costs. Here are some more supply chain digitization benefits:

More organizational flexibility

A digital operating model gives management more freedom and flexibility. For instance, what degree of centralization is needed to support specialization? How can you minimize process costs when you factor in local labor? How can your processes become more productive? With Digitization, you can answer these questions by analyzing data in multiple ways. And then you can be more flexible when implementing solutions.

Better decision making

Once you integrate your supply chain with digital technologies, you can also make faster and more informed decisions for each function. Digitization helps you measure performance accurately and efficiently by aggregating and organizing transactions. This, in turn, allows you to access information at both the micro and macro levels.

For example, BASF (a German multinational chemical corporation) uses AI and machine learning-based technologies to predict the optimal time to replenish supply when stock is running low. This type of automation leads to increased inventory visibility that supports smarter replenishment planning, more efficient decision-making, and better customer service.

Increased automation

An end-to-end digital platform can improve data accuracy, enhance efficiency, and increase supply chain efficiency by automating many labor-extensive processes. From determining the most appropriate shipping mode, implement smarter scheduling, and more — automation saves time and money.

Alerts can also be generated automatically, especially if purchase orders are in danger of delays or complications. This helps companies take precautionary measures and be prepared to handle customers who may have logistics-related complaints.

Accelerating innovation

All digital transformation processes inevitably lead to innovation. Why? When data becomes available, it’s much easier to see trends and inefficiencies. This improvement over conventional supply chain management helps to strengthen the company’s business model over time and builds stronger relationships with suppliers and customers.

End-to-end customer engagement

Digital transformation in supply chain management also increases customer engagement throughout their buying journey. For instance, when placing an order, digitization allows your customers to automatically stay updated with their order details. They know their order status all the way up to receiving it — thanks to the supplier’s automated tracking system. Here, digitization ensures that customers feel more secure and in control when buying.

For example, Farmer Connect uses Blockchain technology to connect coffee growers with the consumers they serve. By launching a mobile application, “Thank My Farmer,” they allow coffee lovers to trace the origin of their coffee and directly support the farmers who grow the beans. The app is a win-win for companies, workers, and customers. It connects the purchaser to traders, farmers, brands, and roasters.

Top trends for supply chain digitization

If you’re looking to improve your organizations overall productivity and performance, here are some supply chain trends you should try:

Integrate your eCommerce website

Integrating eCommerce helps provide a more seamless customer experience and makes your operation more efficient. Once again, the free flow of information across departments is key. Thus, companies immediately see the benefits of interconnected supply chains for eCommerce operations.

Utilize artificial intelligence (AI)

AI in the supply chain helps companies analyze data, enhance performance, and perform routine tasks. AI also helps supply chain leaders solve problems with increased visibility across networks that were previously disparate or remote.

Leverage the Internet of Things (IoT)

An IoT is a network of physical objects connected to the internet. The IoT already plays an important role in the supply chain, and it will gradually grow in importance with increasingly diverse applications. As a matter of fact, within a few years, up to 50% of companies could be using these advanced technologies to support supply chain operations.

IoT has the ability to improve fleet tracking, warehouse management, inventory control, and even technological and mechanical maintenance. Plus, imagine how “smart” warehouses and fleets might increase the accuracy and efficiency of multiple areas of the supply chain.

Integrate Blockchain

Blockchain can be greatly beneficial for businesses to minimize supply chain disruption and improve customer service. In fact, by 2024, global blockchain spending is expected to reach almost 19 billion U.S. dollars.

Blockchain has already helped integrate carriers, logistic providers, and shipping lines into a single platform. The transparency offered by blockchain technology helps to identify issues and cut out waste early in processes.

Create a supply chain digital twin

A digital twin is a model that simulates the supply chain’s performance with AI and advanced analytics, and explores the complexities that show risks and vulnerabilities. Basically, it’s a virtual representation of the supply chain that consists of hundreds of warehouses, assets, inventory, and logistics positions.

Having a digital twin helps increase visibility. It also allows leaders to be more strategic and ready to take advantage of opportunities — especially in complex supply chains.

Five steps to digitize your supply chain

Transforming your traditional supply chain into a digital one is a complex process. However, it’s absolutely necessary to stay competitive. Here’s how to do it in five steps:

Step #1: Define your vision

The first step in implementing digital transformation in the supply chain is to define a clear vision and set some clear, attainable goals. These goals can be related to business objectives like faster decision making, improved supply chain visibility, and automated operations. When defining a vision, you need to:

Assess your resources and existing systems: Identify where you are, and see where you can improve. Do your existing systems use technology that supports your new goals? Can you Identify digital solutions that help you achieve desired business outcomes?
Access your current ability to analyze data: Can you currently collect, generate, and analyze data? If not, it may be hard to come away with actionable insights.
Access your workforce’s skills: Does your team have the necessary skills to work with and adapt to the new business model?

Step #2: Unify your processes

When you unify your processes into one system, you gain end-to-end supply chain visibility. That means you get enhanced transparency to streamline core functions including warehouse management, inventory management, logistics, demand forecasting, and more.

Step #3: Automate as much as possible

Wherever you can, you should replace recurring or routine tasks with automated processes. Not only does it help you simplify tasks, it also allows you to derive meaning from large volumes of data. Make sure not to automate processes that include complex situations or require collaboration between planners — but look at each part of your business and see what can be automated.

#4. Leverage data and analytics

Supply chain leaders need access to real-time data to make more informed decisions. Access to data and analytics helps you deal effectively with partners, suppliers, and your workforce. Real-time data also helps you identify potential disruptions and greatly increases visibility across the supply chain.

You can use AI-powered analytical tools for improving planning processes and drawing actionable insights. For example, using analytics, you can help prevent stock from being depleted completely and adjust your inventory accordingly.

#5. Align your people with your processes

Even if you are looking to shift to a digital supply chain, the switch would be worthless unless your team members are aligned with your new techniques and processes. Always make sure your shift integrates technologies with people, processes, and management. Without full integration, teams won’t be able to achieve your desired results with your new business model.

Allow Cin7 to help with your digital transformation

The quickly evolving technological landscape and increasing customer expectations are causing organizations to revisit how they do business. Adapting new technologies and integrating your supply chain leads to greater flexibility, efficiency and resilience.

For businesses re-evaluating their supply chains, now’s the time for action. Supply chain digital transformation isn’t easy, but it’s definitely worth it. If you have any questions about digitizing your supply chain, get in touch with Cin7 today and we’d be happy to assist you on your digital transformation journey.

How to create gift guides that drive ecommerce sales

Posted on June 8, 2022 | by Cin7 team | Leave a Comment

Gift guides are a great way to make your ecommerce store more appealing to customers. They can be used for any niche, but they are particularly effective in the food and beverage sector.

Essentially, a gift guide is a list of products that are offered at a discounted price. They can be used as an incentive to encourage customers to buy specific products, and they’re a great way to push sales in e-commerce.

However, gift guides are not always easy to create — and there’s a lot of strategic thinking that goes into the process. This article will explain how to create an effective gift guide that can be used to boost ecommerce sales and improve customer satisfaction.

Benefits of creating gift guides for your eCommerce business

A gift guide is a collection of products that are specifically designated to be given as gifts. These guides are useful tools for people who are buying for their friends, family members, and even for themselves.

Gift guides are a great way to increase sales, brand awareness, customer retention, and customer satisfaction. Not only do they help customers stay on your site, gift guides also remind them that they can buy multiple gifts from the same place.

People tend to get overwhelmed when selecting gifts due to the huge number of options available and their preferences-budget constraints — which is why a gift guide is a great solution.

By understanding the reasons that people love gift guides, you’ll be able to create a gift guide that is highly relevant and increases sales.

Gift guides boost brand awareness

Gift guides are extremely useful for boosting brand awareness. They have been used in many industries including banking, retail, healthcare, food and beverage, automotive, and construction.

Gift guides can show off popular or unique products and services. They can be used for both ecommerce sales and social media marketing.

Gift guides boost sales

Gift guides can be used in a variety of ways — depending on the type of gifts you want to highlight and the number of people that you want to reach out to. When people are buying gifts, they usually want something unique and exciting.

The more unique your gift is, the more likely it is to be bought by your target audience, and the higher your sales volume will be. Gift guides can be used as a marketing tool and a way to advertise your company. They make your customers feel special, and they give them a reason to spend more time on your site and make more purchases.

Gift guides generate blog and social media content

Gift guides are also a great way to generate content for your ecommerce site. Since you should leverage blogging as a marketing tactic, gift guides are a great source of content for your blog, social media, and more.

Gift guides generate interesting content that you can use to promote your business on social media. Promoting a good gift guide provides your customers multiple channels to connect and helps gain their trust.

How to create a gift guide for your eCommerce site

Now that you know why you should create a gift guide, here’s how to create one.

Identify your audience

In the ecommerce industry, it’s very important to make sure that your content is relevant to your target audience. Remember, the target audience for gift guides is usually not the same as your recurring customers. You need to understand your target audience for your gift guide, and then figure out the best way to reach them.

To understand your audience, you need to identify their needs and wants, and then craft a message that meets them where they are. The more you understand what your audience wants, the more tailored and effective your message will be.

Demographics

Demographic data like age, gender, income, and location are all very important to understanding your target audience. Different demographics will occupy different niches and market segments, and you’ll need to communicate them differently, too.

Psychographics

Psychographic data is a set of characteristics that describes how people respond to different aspects of advertising. The main motivation behind psychographic research is to understand the different types of people that purchase products, how they buy, why they buy, and the different ways in which they shop.

Psychographics include personal values, ideas and beliefs, affinities, personality types, and preferences.

What items should you feature in your gift guides?

To make sure it’s easy for your customers to get what they want, you need to include the right products in your guide. When you select a product, you should consider various factors like price, quality, and unique features. The following parameters can be helpful when selecting products for your ecommerce gift guide:

Sales history

One of the most important factors to consider when building your gift guide is to have a clear understanding of your sales history. You can look at what sold well last season and try to pick out similar items.

You should also consider product popularity in different regions, buyer segments, and lists of products that were bought by customers during the same timeframe in previous years. Your Inventory Management System can easily provide you with this data and give you key insights into which products should be included in your gift guides or sold as bundled items.

Social media trends

Social media can also help provide insight into your customer’s preferences. You can do a quick search on Pinterest or Instagram to see which type of products are getting more pins, shares, and likes.

It’s also a good idea to keep an eye on products advertised by influencers, as well as their respective engagement rates. That way, you’ll be able to more easily understand a certain product’s selling potential.

Your eCommerce website’s search history

Last but definitely not least, your ecommerce store can also be a goldmine of data. Your customer’s search and navigation history is extremely valuable information. Generally, a user searching for multiple products may plan to use them together, which makes them mutually relevant. You can also use popups that allow your customers to provide suggestions as well.

Leveraging your suppliers

Suppliers can also provide you with valuable information — especially since they deal with multiple ecommerce stores and have a broad understanding of the market. You can ask them about the fastest-moving SKUs and the items with highest demands that are most commonly being ordered in groups.

Build your gift guide’s content stack

Once you finalize the list of products that will go into your gift guide, you should start to develop your content stack. Make downloadable collateral that you can leverage on social media, in blogs and emails, and more.

We recommend building your content in hierarchical order. You can create the most elaborate content first and gradually reduce and repackage information to suit your needs, based on the following factors:

Audience
Niche
Region
Time of sale
Purchase intent

By the way, you should make sure to have the product pictures available and edit for ideal dimensions for each platform.

How to market your gift guides

Include them on your blog

It’s important to market your gift guides by publishing blogs on your website, which help you generate traffic and result in more purchases. You should definitely use your gift guide to make a series of blogs that helps bring people to your website.

Leverage social media

With the advent of social selling, marketing your gift guide on social media is an excellent opportunity to generate revenue and connect directly with your buyers. Depending on your product, you should use Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. These platforms can be a great way to promote your gift guide through both paid advertising and unpaid posts.

Email marketing

Email has been around for decades, and it continues to be the most reliable, popular, and profitable marketing channel for ecommerce. Make sure to send your gift guides to your audience as part of a dedicated email campaign.

Emails can provide you with a good amount of information regarding your audience’s preferences, which in turn can help you shape your overall outreach strategy.

Gift guides boost your sales and keep your customers happy

Gift guides prove to be highly effective for two main reasons: Firstly, the market is flooded with gift choices, which makes the decision-making process tough for the average person. Gift guides make that process easier.

Secondly, it can be a tiring process to browse through entire catalogs of different brands — and it’s even more complicated when they have to make multiple purchases. Gift guides make multiple purchases more likely.

Having a gift guide to curate the most relevant products in one place — and then making it easier to purchase those products right away — helps to provide a great deal of convenience to customers.

A better understanding of your inventory can help in shortlisting the products for gift guide recommendations. Cin7 is a cloud-based inventory management tool that allows you to track your inventory with better accuracy. It provides real-time insights about your stock levels and generates inventory reports.

The inventory reports will offer you valuable insights about your best sellers, and you can integrate them into the gift guide.

Book a call with our experts to discover how Cin7 can streamline your inventory management process.

4 factors to choosing a high-performing software implementation expert

Posted on May 18, 2022 | by Cin7 team | Leave a Comment

Cin7 Experts are specialized consultants who are vetted by Cin7 and are committed to providing resources to help brands, retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers with a wide range of business needs. Experts can handle anything from data migration, technical training, ecommerce, process development and automation, and financial planning.

Since the Cin7 Expert directory went live, UK software integration company Bluehub has zoomed to the top of the rankings, spurred on by five-star reviews from enthused customers. We asked them how they ended up as the top-reviewed Cin7 Expert, and what customers should look out for when choosing a software implementation partner to help them on their inventory management software journey.

Here’s what they told us:

Take the time to understand where your customers are at
Specialize in top inventory management apps
The best experts hire from industry
Top experts build custom integrations and make use of APIs

Bluehub began as a Xero ecosystem consultancy and custom software development house, helping customers identify which apps would be right for their business, setting up those apps, and then providing ongoing support. But after a couple of years, they realized that the customers who needed the most help were almost always product-based businesses looking for an inventory solution — so they pivoted hard into that space.

“Over the last six years, we’ve been solely focused on helping product-based businesses,” says Bluehub founder Guy Earnshaw. “We help customers either build on a foundation of an existing cloud system — like Xero or QuickBooks — or we help people who are on legacy, server-based systems take that first step into the cloud with online accounting, plus one of the inventory apps.”

#1 Top Experts take the time to understand where customers are in their journey

Most of Bluehub’s clients fall into one of two categories. The first is established businesses that are looking to move online — to migrate from an existing ERP, or an offline inventory management solution (such as Sage, or even spreadsheets.) Others are those who have already begun their cloud journey, with accounting software like Xero or QuickBooks Online. Bluehub says it’s vital for Experts to understand where a customer is on their journey, what their current level of expertise is, and where they want to go.

“All the clients that we speak to have already started their own journey of looking at software,” Guy says. “So they’re coming to this with some level of education of what they want to do, the sort of problems they’re trying to fix and what their options might be in this space. So the way we describe ourselves to those people is that we are software consultants and developers who specialize in product based businesses going through this transition.”

From a platform of mutual understanding, Bluehub is well placed to help their clients transform their businesses for the better.

“We help with system selection and implementation, which includes everything like training, data migration, and a bit of support,” Guy says. “And then we have ongoing relationships with our clients where we provide basic user support to big integrations, too. So we’re an end-to-end service for businesses just like theirs looking to make exactly this transition.”

#2 The most effective Experts focus on just one or two inventory apps

Early in their journey, Bluehub supported all the inventory software solutions they could. But now they do most of their inventory management consulting work with just two apps: Cin7 and DEAR Systems. Why is that? Zeroing in on just a couple of best-of-breed apps means you can provide better services to customers, faster. There’s less overhead, and fewer learning requirements. You can just get on with the job, confident in the knowledge that your clients are on the best possible system for their needs.

“A big part of that shift is we’re working with more and more complex and larger businesses. From an accounting and a production perspective, DEAR is really quite advanced for products in this range,” Guy says.

Bluehub reckons that the partnership with DEAR is what helps drive great outcomes with their clients.

“[Partnership] gives us an incredible product that we get to sell to our clients and build on that.
Guy says. “And your service can only be as good as the system that you are implementing. Thankfully DEAR gives us a whole heap of tools in our hands that satisfy our clients — we have so many ‘wow’ moments when we’re giving demos or even when we’re working with clients during consultancy.”

#3 The best Experts hire staff from industry

All over the accounting, bookkeeping, software-coaching and implementation world, Experts are finding that one of the best ways to support customers in a particular industry is to hire from that industry. Hiring from industry confers a huge advantage for Experts — it builds credibility amongst their customer base, and enables them to either double down on support for a particular niche, or easily expand to related industries.

“In recent years we’ve hired more people that actually worked in our client’s industries,” Guy says. “We’re taking people out of the manufacturing sector, out of the wholesale and distribution sectors, who’ve worked in industry for over a decade.”

Usually, the industry professionals Bluehub has been hiring have experience in working with large, bespoke ERP implementations. This experience has proved invaluable, as they’re now able to help companies implement a much more nimble and yet highly extensible and inexpensive ERP, in the form of DEAR Systems.

“We’ve brought them into our team to help our clients transition their processes and really fully adapt to the system,” Guy says.

#4 High-performing Experts don’t implement unwieldy ERPs. Instead, they build bespoke integrations and make use of APIs

Top software implementation experts know that the best way to help small and medium businesses thrive is to get them online as soon as possible. For companies that ship physical products, inventory management software is a must-have. But even for SMEs with specialist requirements, they don’t recommend high-maintenance, expensive legacy ERPs.

Instead, they say to get on software like Cin7 or DEAR Systems, as a good Expert partner will be able to make use of APIs to build all the bespoke integrations and app bridges they could ever need.

Bluehub began as a software development house first and foremost, and that legacy comes to the fore when a customer needs something custom-built.

“We still have development at our core, and we build a lot of integrations — often with third party logistics (3PL) companies, but also with eCommerce websites, and a few custom apps for people who have unique requirements,” Guy says.

When a Bluehub client gets set up on DEAR, they end up with a fully-customized system, purpose-built for them out of off-the-shelf components. This app stack often beats the capability of a legacy ERP, at a fraction of the cost.

About Bluehub

Bluehub is a top-ranking software implementation company and DEAR Expert partner. They provide innovative system integrations and solutions that support their client’s businesses operations and growth. From initial discovery into client needs, to set-up, training and roll-out, Bluehub provides a fully managed service from start to finish.

About Cin7 Experts

Cin7 Experts experienced with DEAR are an essential part of the Cin7 inventory and order management community. No matter what kind of product business you’re running, where you’re located, or what you’re trying to achieve, there’s a Cin7 Expert on DEAR who can help you achieve your ambition while saving your money and time.

Traditional ERP systems vs cloud-based ecommerce software

Posted on May 12, 2022 | by Cin7 team | Leave a Comment

Ecommerce, also called electronic commerce or internet commerce, is a business model that lets you buy and sell goods and services over the Internet. So, ecommerce software allows your online store to operate. The transaction of money (funds) is also a part of ecommerce.

ERP systems are a type of software used to manage enterprise data. ERP systems help different organizations in dealing with various departments of an enterprise. It takes care of departments like inventory management, customer order management, production planning, shipping, and accounting.

ERP systems combine all databases across the company into a single database and can be accessed by all employees of the enterprise. It helps you in the automation of the tasks involved to perform a business process.

We will learn about the fundamental differences between the two systems in this article to help you make a better choice.

What is an ERP system?

Running a business is all about juggling things from finance to operations, and sales to marketing. ERP systems aim to consolidate back-office processes into one system. They help you track, share and store information across various departments, and ensure that all the employees rely on the same data.

Popular ERPs like NetSuite, Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft Dynamics are traditional business management systems with accounting at the core. To keep up with the changing tide of retail, there are many integrations for ecommerce solutions like:

Warehouse Management Systems (WMS)

Order Management Systems (OMS)

Inventory Management Systems (IMS)

Supply Chain Management (SCM)

Product Information Management (PIM)

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Business Intelligence (BI)

Customer Experience Management (CX)

Human Resources Management (HRM)

Shopping carts like Shopify

Challenges of ERPs in ecommerce

ERP monoliths are not tailored to a specific industry or line of business, so the quality of ecommerce integrations often fall short of expectations. ERPs were built based on older technology and have not kept up with the ever-changing marketplace requirements or the level of innovation that ecommerce software regularly delivers.

Most ERPs are built for back-office purposes. They are not meant for customer-facing sites like a web store that require real-time transactions and analysis.

By hinging your whole multi-channel business on an inflexible system like this, you risk non-compliance, listing errors, and other mistakes. It could cost you the right to sell on marketplaces like Amazon.

ERPs require major financial and time investments. Apart from annual subscription fees, you may face up-front and support costs running into hundreds of thousands of dollars. Plus, it may take years to implement an ERP system fully and that could lead to disruptive changes to your business.

What is ecommerce software?

Ecommerce software is the system that allows your online store to operate. Ecommerce software may include business tools like inventory management, accounting, and email marketing.

Put simply, ecommerce software lets you list products for sale and accept payments online. But, most online businesses usually need more than the bare minimum, and ecommerce software adds other business management tools.

The best ecommerce software has all the basic tools you need to get started, with an ecosystem of upgraded tools and platforms that you can use as your business grows.

Types of ecommerce software

There are mainly three types of ecommerce software:

1# Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

Both of the above offer ecommerce solutions via the Internet. SaaS provides solutions through cloud-based software, and if adding hardware, it becomes a PaaS. These are both straightforward options for those who are not tech-savvy.

Additional design and custom features may require some developer skills. But, patches, updates, and new features are dealt with automatically.

These services charge on a monthly basis and may include transaction fees, but provide full support when required.

2# On-premise platforms

These solutions are hosted locally on servers by the retailer and managed by their IT department. On-site professionals are required to fix any problems as they occur, add new features, and do manual updates.

If you have your own internal IT team, then on-premise may be an excellent option for you. It allows firms to gain more control over their site and create their custom storefront solution.

ERP vs ecommerce software

Let’s compare ERP systems with inventory management software (an ecommerce software) as an example to get a better idea.

While researching inventory management software online, you may end up on a site that aggregates a list of providers like Capterra or GetApp that helps you compare features, benefits, and prices.

So, you can usually group your options into two main categories:

All-in-one platforms such as a supply chain management platform or an ERP

Dedicated warehouse and inventory management software

An all-in-one solution may sound enticing as it offers “full stock” in one place and can manage multiple systems and processes using one software solution. A dedicated inventory management software specializes in specific sales and accounting functions and integrates with a wide range of other software.

So, the choice depends on either using software that does everything but doesn’t specialize in a specific area or using a stack of specialized software with integrations to one another.

Conclusion

Businesses often choose to use an all-in-one or ERP as it offers the ability to manage all administrative tasks in one place. But, as all-in-ones are so focused on managing so many things at once, they often lack the level of granularity required to fully handle inventory and warehouse processes like ecommerce software can.

If the idea of a cloud-based SaaS solution for inventory and order management is one that appeals to you over an ERP, schedule a demo of Cin7 here and we’ll show you how it can be your centralized resource for managing sales, inventory, accounting, warehousing and fulfillment.