Success Recipe for Nigerian Trading Industry Volume #1 Sep. 2012 | Page 4

here’s how 1 A Major Trading Company, identifies productivity increment as its objective and consults STPL for its OpenERP Practice. STPL’s partner inventory tracking system integrated with a real-time inventory management and analytical accounting system, increases the company’s productivity by 62%.. 2 THE COMPANY The company was founded in 1998. The company was very small at the time, with Steve, Rebeca and a few seasonal workers handling the day-to-day responsibilities for nearly 10 years. In the late 2010’s, the team decided that they would transition their company from retailer to wholesaler. The reason behind this big move was simple -- they wanted to open their business to greater opportunity in trading industry, as well as offer their affiliates the ability to retail their products with ease of mind. Since then, the company has grown multiple times and is currently serving more than 500 customers . 3 THE SITUATION STPL’s consulting team analyzed the ground situation at the company and realized that the client’s team was unable to manage the huge set of documents created every day, which included tons of invoices and purchase orders among others. The accounts team neither has an idea of the accounts receivable nor the accounts payable on a real-time basis, were unable to match PO with Invoices, and many such basic problems. Further, the sales team did not have a real time picture of the inventory at hand, and most of the PO received from the retailers were being serviced “as is”. The managers were constantly firefighting the complains from the retailers on delayed delivery of goods, and to avoid large partners from moving out of their business, the managers were stocking more inventory than required, resulting in many of these expiring before sale. The management had no clear picture on the amount of loss they were making, keep aside the constant hue and cry created by the retailers, suppliers, and employees. The Company used a homegrown EDI solution for some time. The problem the staff faced was that the solution did not have the ability to integrate to the company’s Accounting system. With this shortcoming causing serious strain on their growing business, the company’s leadership saw an imminent need to purchase a solution that would better facilitate their accounting practices and save precious time and money for their business . 4 THE SOLUTION STPL’s OpenERP solution was capable to resolve all these issues. Further, the client was able to save a lot of investment on software license as the solution proposed was an open source system. STPL implemented the OpenERP system for Inventory and Store management, Sales and Marketing Management, Electronic Document Management and the Analytical Accounting System, all integrated and exchanging data seamlessly without any manual intervention from users. . veggie & organic 4