Sika streamlines its processes with Cin7

The rattan and wicker furniture company sells B2B at wholesale to retail stores, interior designers, architects and hospitality designers.

Sika Design USA began using Cin7 earlier this year and has noticed a huge improvement in efficiencies since, Sika Design US managing director Brendan McCarthy says. “Efficiency has increased substantially, which will lead to the company achieving profitability sooner.”

Before deciding to focus on B2B furniture at Sika Design, Brendan had been working in the ecommerce world, where he had some experience with an ERP solution. Although he knew the ERP system was a good fit in terms of what Sika Design USA needed, he needed something less expensive and easier to implement.

A random Google search last year led Brendan to Cin7 at 2am, and 36 hours later he trialled it. “With [the ERP] we knew that if everything’s perfect, it takes six months to get it up and running, and I didn’t have six months. Cin7 was live within six weeks.”

All-in-one solution

Brendan had considered about 7 to 10 other software providers “but Cin7 was the only one in the price range we were looking for that had 95 percent of the wants, all in one solution.”

Brendan says Cin7 quoting, orders and Open to Sell functionality have saved him time and even prevented him hiring an extra staff member.

Selling stock before it arrives

With Open to Sell, Brendan can now understand actual available inventory instead of just what’s on hand. “We will be able to look at what’s on order so we can continue to sell merchandise that’s not yet arrived. It’s presold by the time it arrives.”

And just by clicking buttons, Brendan can look at sales orders, run a report and understand what’s available, and then build that into a Purchase Order. “It’s doing all of the addition for me across 30 different sales orders rather than having to export each one into Excel and then manually calculate it. With a couple of clicks with Cin7, it’s doing all that for me.”

Another key factor when selecting Cin7 was the fact it has a basic CRM built inside the quoting module. Once again, that replaced doing quoting manually on a spreadsheet solution and trying to keep track of many spreadsheets. “Having all of that in a cloud-based system is much easier, and certainly makes the business much more efficient.”

Saving 15 mins for each quote

Brendan estimates Cin7 saves 15 minutes for each quote that’s drafted, and he no longer needs another person to manage the quoting. “There’s about 120 hours of work that needs to get done, and I’m able to get by because of Cin7 without needing to get the incremental hire immediately.”

The accurate cost of goods sold and landed costs are another key Cin7 functionality for Brendan. When Sika Design US brings in a container product out of Indonesia, he needs to understand true margin on a First in First out basis. “In the past, we really had no clue what our landed cost was on each container and what our true margin was for each unit sold. Now we have a single piece of software to manage the business right from initial customer lead all the way to managing payment terms.”

Brendan was also sold on the fact Cin7 integrates with accounting platforms Xero and QuickBooks Online, and that it has Colour-size grids which enable him to build multiple colour options for a single item. “I had been in too many software scenarios where if something had to be done it would take months of development and tens and thousands of dollars.”

Support behind Cin7 “phenomenal”

How would he summarize Cin7? “I would say for us it’s a wholesale B2B furniture company’s all-in-one solution that improves efficiency. It streamlines the lead-to-customer process, the CRM-to-quote, to sales order, to account setup. All being in one system really is much, much faster than relying on a support CRM backend tool.”

He says Cin7 provides enterprise-level B2B functioning for the small to mid-sized business. “Support behind it has been phenomenal, which you tend not to find in less expensive all-in-one solutions – especially when the headquarters of that are in the other side of the globe.”