What Your Marketing Department Can Learn From Your Inventory Management System

A chain reaction of improvements

Since their Cin7 implementation, Brompton’s US business has gone from strength to strength. The first and most important ingredient in their transformation: their inventory management is now tip-top. Phil cites a laundry list of improvements, including the ability to ring-fence stock for certain channels, preventing mis-ships.

“Another work around we used to have, when we were using QuickBooks for inventory, was that we had to create different items for different channels, even if they were the same thing, because it didn’t have different channel pricing,” says Phil. “That was ridiculous. But Cin7 can easily do different channel pricing — we can do cost, retail, VIP pricing, all in the software. All these different tiers. That is a huge step up.”

“The product set-up is really good. I actually think it’s brilliant. It’s a lot more flexible, and we can include more detail and information in it that we couldn’t before, which gives us a lot more agility,” Phil says.

Integrations power the customer buy cycle

A big part of what makes Cin7 so powerful for Brompton is its 700+ integrations.

“The integrations, and Cin7’s depth of knowledge in that area, was a big part of it. It reassured us that we were making the right choice,” Phil says. “Other inventory management companies were more concerned about their own product, and not necessarily about what it connects with.”

Phil also notes that the Cin7 integrations and features they’re not already using give Brompton enormous scope to continue their growth without having to change inventory management solutions. “It gives us flexibility to grow as a business, knowing that we can add modules or apps on,” Phil says. “We can see that there is space to integrate with retail partners, to utilize Cin7’s B2B Online Stores, and to integrate with our 3PL. Those are performance enhancements that would be very difficult to match with another system, and it’s included in Cin7, which is a bonus.”

Cin7 benefits help the bike books balance

With Cin7 powering Brompton’s US operation across multiple channels, Brompton has a visibility and understanding of their operations that they never could have achieved before. And it’s not just the operations team that have benefited. Accounting, marketing, and leadership have all seen huge improvements. “We’ve got the whole US business in there,” says Phil. “We’ve got sales, operations, ecommerce, managers and others, all benefiting from Cin7.”

Brompton uses its internal accounting division to do the books for its US operation, which would normally be difficult and rife with errors. Thanks to Cin7’s QuickBooks Online integration, data flows smoothly, and inventory lines up neatly with the accounts. This powerful ability was what really helped sell Cin7 to Brompton’s accounting department.

“The accounting integration was a big part of what clinched it for Cin7,” Phil says. “Cin7 could slip in, almost unnoticed in a way, to the UK accountants and they could just keep doing their jobs — which made it easier for us to sell to that department!”

Marketing is also reaping the benefits, with the ability to effortlessly understand stock availability, and know exactly what goods can go on sale and when. Brompton’s Head of Marketing is able to look at Cin7 and know that there’s stock coming in before he launches a promotion on any one of Brompton’s channels. “In our previous systems, we never had that visibility. Now he can go ‘Ah, we’ve got 50 bikes that are available in the store, let’s get them out the door,’” Phil says.

Brompton’s leadership are also getting great mileage out of Cin7’s extensive reporting capabilities. “The president of our company is using it for reporting, and he’s noticing that the reporting is a lot stronger than we had before,” Phil says.