About Essential Living
Since 1991, Essliv is engaged in providing a high-quality, affordable beauty & health solution with a strong preference for products that are natural and organic.
Simon Fenley, the Executive Director at Essliv, discovered Orderhive and presented their various business requirements to our team.
Looking at the complexities and various storefronts, Orderhive Enterprise could have been the only solution for Essliv.
“With an extensive range of reputable international brands under our roof, we supply to over 250 retail stores in Singapore. We also run online stores on BigCommerce, WooCommerce and PrestaShop and have sister companies operating in Malaysia and the Philippines. We closely monitor the efficacy and effectiveness of the products we choose in terms of cost and quality.”
Challenges
Multi-location warehouse management
Essliv were operating their supply chain through 3 international warehouses; Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines. Under these international warehouses there were a couple of inter-country warehouses which are operated by their parent warehouse (International warehouse).
This aroused some communication difficulties, as it is impossible to pack every staff involved in multiple warehouse management into a single office. Also, collaboration among the back-office department & warehouse staff was difficult.
On the top of this, the staff also have to handle taxes, which are incurred once the stock gets transferred to warehouse located in another country.
Dealing in perishable products
A significant portion of the items the company deals in was of perishable nature so the time that a particular product stays in the warehouse is very limited. On and off, Simon & his team had to make sure that the items are stored only for a stipulated amount of time in the warehouses, the moment it starts to get closer to the expiry date, the item should be disposed of.
However, with human intervention the process was becoming tedious. Often the logistic team picks latest manufactured items leaving the soon to expired products at the warehouse.
Keeping track of the expiry date
The international warehouses can receive and give shipments by generating an invoice. The items are also allocated with specific batch no. and expiry date. However, it was not feasible for the warehouse management staff to capture the correct expiry data while receiving the shipment because of time & human resource constraints.
Maintaining FIFO methodology
The team at Essliv has to make sure that goods that have the nearest expiry date are sold first.
Simon added details like batch no., expiry date and inventory counts for a particular item in the Orderhive back-end. The solution is implemented where the products with the nearest expiry date are picked first for consignment.
Inter-Warehouse Stock Transfer
The stock transfer process between warehouses was not streamlined, as the stock sometimes moves within a specific country. There was no invoice attached to it which led to inefficient management of inventory and confusion of data.
There was no centralized system which could monitor the movement of stock within the inter state warehouses.
A Powerful ERP system was what they needed
The company needed a structured environment to handle the daily business processes. The team was in need of a solution that can not only automate its core business functionalities but can also support features which can enhance their pricing management & customer management capabilities.
Simon approached an Orderhive expert to see if Orderhive can address the company’s custom needs.
“The reason I approached Orderhive was because they provide custom solution under Orderhive Enterprise. Orderhive turned out to be the only on-demand platform that combines financials/ERP, multi-channel selling and multi-warehouse management functionality in a single system.”
Solution Delivered
Automated Process to optimally utilize Perishable goods
Simon added details like batch no., expiry date and inventory counts for a particular item in the Orderhive back-end.
After an order is confirmed, the Orderhive system automatically generates the “Pick List” on FIFO basis.
The Logistic staff picks items according to the “Pick List”. This operation is fully automated by Orderhive without any manual or human intervention.
The staff doesn’t need to calculate which items they need to pick first.
Automated process to segment customer groups to implement multiple pricing tiers
“With Orderhive, we are able to segment customers by customer type & product brand type and can assign rates accordingly.
The pricing tiers application can be further refined by customer type belonging to a particular brand type.
The below image perfectly defines the pricing tier feature implemented:
So if a customer called Neel orders cranberry, the cost of the product will be 40 and the applied discounted rate will be 10%, so the actual cost offered to Neel will be 36.
Streamlined multi-warehouse workflow
Inventory Management
The inventory gets automatically adjusted across the selling channels, once an order is fulfilled.
Bin Management
Bin management allowed Essliv to receive inventory into preferred bin locations enabling their staff members to easily pick items during the fulfillment process.
Cross-border stock transfer
“Orderhive provided us real-time visibility into inventory details like batch no., expiry date so we can easily create the invoices and transfer the stock without much hassles.
To ease the financial process, the system automatically calculates predefined tax rate, making it easier to generate invoices and ease the cross-border stock transfer.”
Inter-Warehouse stock transfer
Inter-warehouse stock transfer encourages easy transfer of stock between warehouses located within a country. With this feature, the team members can create orders whenever the stock goes low for a particular item and receive the shipments with ease.
They can make sure that warehouses are never out of products which are in high demand and need quick replenishment. Also, once the stock is transferred to another warehouse, the system automatically updates the stock level across the warehouses, eliminating the possibility of stock discrepancy.
Results
The company modernized its core business processes & powered its financials reporting, inventory and warehouse operations from a unified cloud-based business management platform.
Implementing solution with Orderhive provide us with:
- The best in class cost-effective SaaS solution, that scales with our high-volume business.
- An industry-specific solution which easily incorporates new functionality which enhanced our back-end operation.
- A high-speed private cloud solution that comes with ongoing 24/7 technical support.
