Melbourne-based Saison was established in 2003 and offers a carefully curated collection of unique products. They distribute to specialist stores in Australia, New Zealand and South-East Asia as well as direct to public via retail site shopsaison.com.au. Working with new, exciting products keeps Jason enthusiastic about Saison; he really enjoys making overseas trends accessible to the Australasian market.
The Problem – Retail Inventory Management
Jason was seeking to branch out from the existing server-based solution Saison had been using for nine years. He felt that it wasn’t meeting their requirements: “The file was ridiculously large, so it was incredibly slow and inefficient to use,” Jason explains. With a website that is separate to the wholesale business (which is rapidly growing), he was eager to get up and running with a new system that could unite both the retail and wholesale systems. He wanted a solution that would provide longevity of service, supporting and facilitating business growth over the next five to ten years and beyond.
The Solution
Jason came across Unleashed as he was seeking an inventory management software solution that would integrate with Xero and Magento. He had Convertworx recommended by his accountant to handle the implementation and made the most of their Unleashed experts.
Implementation process:
Getting on board with Unleashed was a breeze for Jason thanks to the skilled assistance of Inbal and Eran Steinberg of Convertworx. “I just don’t know how we could have done it without them,” Jason says. Recalling the set up process, Jason reports that cleansing the data was a large project with the large backlog from the old system to go through. “A huge amount was redundant and we needed to get rid of that and start afresh,” he explains. This process was completed with assistance from Convertworx so that Jason had clean, relevant data ready for the go-live with Unleashed.
The Result
Along with the remote access and integration capabilities of Unleashed, Jason has also been tapping into the API (application programming interface) briefing Convertworx to create a custom dashboard that displays data from Unleashed to meet the specific needs of his sales reps. Jason has been thrilled with the efficiency and independence that Unleashed has brought Saison’s agents: “Before we implemented Unleashed, our agents were flying blind. Now they can access the data they need to service customers. They don’t have to come back to head office all the time seeking that information — it’s at their fingertips.” Jason has been thrilled with how the new system has been working, “it really frees the agents up and gives them a far better understanding of where they’re at with certain customers.”
Reflecting on the overall benefits of Unleashed, Jason mentions the speed and efficiency. Along with this, the visibility of true costs has been a major plus.
Being able to add your freight costs at the time of entering the purchase order from a supplier is great. It gives us a much better understanding of what we’re actually making off a product.
