In 2019, Whitehouse Cleaning Equipment and Supplies was experiencing significant growing pains in their business.
Their customer base was growing, along with increases in the number of products and suppliers they were managing. They were having issues with inaccurate stock quantities that were resulting in significant wasted time double checking stock levels, and in generating purchase orders. Their purchase prices were often out of date, resulting in excessive calls to suppliers for price updates, or worse, selling at the wrong price impacting their margins.
Their existing web customer order portal was standalone and took significant time to maintain and keep in sync with their inventory system.
There was not much time left to focus on their business.
The Opportunity
With over 4,000 active product lines (in 2019) plus many additional ‘on request’ products to manage, they needed a new system with capabilities across:
- An integrated online shopping portal for customers
- Maintaining stock levels accurately
- Predictive purchasing reflecting purchasing trends automatically as products gained and lost favour
- Easily keeping supplier purchase prices up to date to maintain sales margins
- Managing repair jobs as well as growing product sales
The Infoware Solution
Infoware’s integrated customer order shopping portal allows Whitehouse’s customers and staff to view and manage the entire ordering process, from checking customer specific pricing and stock levels through to producing quotes, internal order approvals, picking and delivery status and payments. Order templates allow for fast processing of regular items, including maintaining customers’ own stock on hand par levels to calculate order quantities.
Product fact sheets including product images to help customers to make informed decisions and correctly identify products.
Most importantly, the product setup is done only once in Infoware and it’s ready to be sold online immediately.
Infoware’s Run Planner is an intrinsic management tool that lets Whitehouse manage the entire customer order process providing a consistent centralised view for all staff. Once an order is created it immediately appears on the run planner for action.
- Orders change colour upon being received, submitted for picking, picked, loaded, delivered, then invoiced.
- No orders are missed. Even orders for customers with credit issues are visible to all the team but are separated and quarantined until paid.
- Backorder releases for customer orders not yet released are highlighted.
- Plan runs for each delivery area, including allocation of vehicles and drivers. You can also check load weights.
- Produce manifests including delivery dockets or invoices for the entire run with a single click.
Repair orders appear separately from sales orders and are managed by a different team. When repairs are complete, they move to the run planner for delivery.
Significant time is spent by many businesses updating product purchase prices either manually or via a spreadsheet of only the suppliers’ products they carried in stock. Whitehouse previously did the same when they had time. They now upload supplier price lists for all the supplier’s products in advance of their effective date.
Infoware automatically filters out the products not currently carried, saving considerable time. Importantly purchase and sell price changes are defined in advance for their effective date. It is critical the updated purchase prices are locked in with the associated sell prices to protect margins at the same time, with no further effort.
Infoware’s predictive purchasing intelligently creates supplier purchase orders for only the required stock lines, based on required sales requirements. This allows limited warehouse space to be used efficiently, reducing capital requirements tied up in slow moving or dead stock lines.
“The important point is not the list of additional benefits added since Infoware was installed but that there are ongoing commercial benefits being added to Infoware on an ongoing basis. If we have a requirement then this is addressed rather than being bogged down with a system that needs offline work arounds”
The Outcome
Whitehouse has grown by 20 – 30% each year since Infoware was installed in 2019, while active products have increased from 4,000 to over 10,000 line items. The only headcount increase is an additional delivery driver plus a larger truck to accommodate the growth. The admin team has remained the same size even though business has grown by over 150%.
Predictive purchasing has revolutionised their purchasing processes and minimised out of stocks and back orders. This has allowed them to stock more product lines in the same size warehouse, enabling faster delivery to customers.
How do they feel about predictive purchasing? “We would be lost without it… what took me 3-4 days at the end of each month now takes about 2 hours with Infoware. Also, Infoware is much more accurate so there are less purchase orders to create backorders during the remainder of the month.” – Kathy Webber, Purchasing Manager
Initially managing supplier funded rebates was not considered important to Whitehouse. However, an increasing number of suppliers now pass on special pricing to select corporate customers and government departments as supplier funded discounts. These are claimed back monthly from each supplier through Infoware, with gross profit reporting incorporating rebates to always report correct margins.
Kathy Webber comments: ‘Critically the functionality of Infoware continues to evolve. Some are directly from our requests – others as part of Infoware updates. Focus on the customer ‘self-service’ portal makes it easier for customers to deal with Whitehouse plus reduces our admin – 24/7 – a win/win for both parties.
- Quotes. Many customers need a formal quote before being able to generate a purchase order in their systems. Much easier to let them do it themselves!
- Orders requiring approval. Many of our customers are contract cleaners. They can define each of their client sites, and each onsite cleaner can create an order through our portal. Then it is approved by their manager before being released into Infoware for picking.
- Onsite contract cleaners can enter budgets into Infoware for each site. Expenditure over budget is approved by their manager before orders are accepted.
- The option to define multiple order templates for a customer – the easier and more personalised the ordering experience is the more likely customers will use it – reducing the workload on Whitehouse’s customer service team.
- We now define additional information on our portal to help our customers – such as sales brochures andSafety Data Sheets (SDS).
“All the above allows more orders to be processed as our business grows with no additional customer service effort.”
Another tool to help with sales was the addition of a price calculator for internal users to immediately determine margins for price matching or quoting.
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