Case Study 02:

Core Competencies Used:

Background

Nurise is a small but fast-growing organization based out of Mississauga, Ontario. The business carries an inventory consisting of a wide array of summer products from patio furniture to pool accessories. Acting as the middleman between retail giants (such as Zellers and Sears) and their inventory suppliers. They ship not only to specific store locations, but to individual buyers as well. In the past year, sales have more than doubled and company expects a further increase. In order to meet the growing sales demands Nurise needed a cost-effective efficiency solution.

Problem overview

Efficiency is essential for Nurise to stay competitive in its market. Small organizations, like Nurise, often find it difficult to perform as efficiently as they could, because efficiency solutions usually require a substantial investment. Nurise handled all inventory tracking and customer service using a few Excel spreadsheets. While this method can work quite well for a start-up company, it can quickly fall to pieces if the company faces rapid growth. Nurise had graduated from its days of using Excel as its number one solution, and required a customized software solution that would solve all of the issues they were facing, without incurring the substantial costs of standard inventory management packages.

Poor customer management

• Lack of real-time inventory knowledge for management
• Inability to effectively create and search through orders
• No automated inventory management tool
• No method for dealing with pending orders
• No automated Shipping labels
• Double entry into the DHL system for creation of waybills
• Double entry of orders coming into the system from suppliers
• No reporting to track orders, receipts, and inventory
• No data sharing or interconnectivity

Solution

After sitting down with Nurise management and staff, both parties were able to analyze the short-comings of the existing system and discover what was needed in order to help Nurise achieve its goals and be as efficient as possible. Inovex set out to build a customized solution for Nurise, Inovex Inventory Small Business Edition (SBE), that would solve all of the headaches the business was having. This solution employed three of our core competencies:

EveryThink - integrate all systems together to ease operations

CustomEyes - a comprehensive, user friendly yet powerful front-end

GeneWriter - automatically create orders, invoices and vital reports

Software Components

Client Server Model

A “client-server” application was developed using a Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Edition (MSDE) database on the back-end, with communication being driven by a Windows Forms front-end. Ensuring that data between all users was effectively shared at minimal cost.

Client Management

Users can easily, enter, search and track all clients from department stores to individual buyers through the user-friendly client management system.

Order Output to DHL, Canada Post and More!

The system allows order outputs through Canada Post or through DHL. The user can easily see which orders need to be shipped and can create a file for entry into the DHL system. This saves hundreds of man-hours every month that would be spent entering this information into the DHL system manually and safeguards against human error inherent in data entry.

In addition to output into third party systems, this component also enables users to print off shipping labels that were otherwise manually entered in a word processor. Automation of this feature easily shaves a couple hours of data entry off of each day!

The order output component also allows the user to search back through historical archives to find output files for informative purposes, and where necessary to select the files for a second output.

Order Management At a Glance!

Using the Inventory SBE system, users can create normal orders, pending orders, or split orders where quantities do not currently exist in inventory. All orders that have been created are easily searchable by client name, date of order, phone number and location. To make it easy for users to see “orders at a glance”, the main screen is even divided into four areas allowing users to see: Today’s Orders, Post-Dated Orders, Pending Orders and Orders Awaiting Approval.

Order Input from Suppliers!

In addition to receiving individual orders over the phone, Nurise also receives bulk orders in the form of an Excel spreadsheet from its suppliers. In order to facilitate receiving orders in this method, Inovex developed an import function that takes these spreadsheets and imports them into the inventory system avoiding any double entry. Should there be any errors on input, the Inventory system will display these inconsistencies and allow the user to correct them on screen.

Reporting Tools that Save Time!

Now, Nurise can keep track of inventory dynamics with specialized reports on the following:

• Inventory Report
• Daily Shipping and Receiving Report
• Weekly Shipping and Receiving Report
• Pending Orders Report
• Orders Awaiting Approval Report

Each report is HTML formatted for display, but has the ability to be imported into Microsoft Excel for further number crunching and advanced formatting.

Benefits

Using the Inventory SBE system Nurise Sales and Marketing enjoys the following benefits:

• Higher percentage of satisfied customers
• Capability to efficiently handle a growing inventory
• Instant access to reports indicating the warehouse’s current inventory, shipping and receiving status
• Elimination of time-consuming data entry
• Interconnectivity ensuring all employees are on the same page

Inovex’s solution was able to cater to each issue facing Nurise, creating a highly beneficial tool that has ultimately increased the productivity of the Nurise team.

Problems Solved