- Industry: Retail
- Area of Expertise: Custom Apps Development
Background
For this project, our client was a manufacturer and retailer with a combination of B2B and B2C sales. These different sales funnels translated into different warehouse requirements in Zoho Inventory. In particular, our client needed to manage separate counts of parts needed for each pipeline.
Additionally, our client operated entirely in house, doing all the needed sales, manufacturing, and preparation for shipment themselves. As a result, they needed ample process automation to manage the workload amongst their small team.
Solution: Inventory Management Setup
Inventory
We set up an integration between Zoho Inventory and ShipStation, an external tool used for shipping and order fulfillment. This process began with the placement of sales orders in Zoho Inventory, for B2B orders, or WooCommerce, the e-commerce platform used in our client’s B2C sales.
From this point, the package took different paths depending on its origin point. For packages originating in WooCommerce, the Sales Order was simultaneously created in Shipstation and Zoho Inventory. From this point, a Package was created, associated with the Sales Order, in Zoho inventory. Following this, any suspicious orders are flagged for potential fraud, putting them in a queue to be manually reviewed by a team member.
Alternatively, as Sales Orders were created directly in Zoho Inventory, they triggered creation of Packages in Zoho Inventory. Following this point, the Order was ready to be marked shipped.
When the package was marked as shipped in ShipStation, a call was made to a function housed in Zoho CRM to handle updates to the Sales Order and associated Invoices.
Analytics
We built a Build-and-Ship board through a series of Analytics dashboards. These dashboards housed all upcoming shipments, and the items that needed to be packed for each.
Using this information, the board showed the inventory our client had on hand to build the composite items. It also ranks priority based on shipment date and due date, and also prioritized packages based on component availability. Furthermore, the Build-and-Ship board also counts days to depletion on various parts.
Outcomes
- Standardized inventory process, with the ability to track inventory based on business pipeline and warehousing
- Provided clients with a visual on their purchase orders and packages, compared to their inventory levels
- Gave clients a better idea of where their excess inventory was, and hence enabled better purchase order management
By leveraging the Zoho One suite, we created multiple powerful inventory solutions that can be applied to many manufacturers and retailers. This enables rapid scaling through automated processes, and can greatly improve inventory management and efficiency.