BNC was approached by one of our longtime clients with a need to assist with their Retail/Warehouse/E-Commerce systems. As a company that provides computer support to the Dallas and Denver markets, BNC stepped up to the challenge in upgrading the new business’ systems for a better IT network experience.
Phase One
Originally, they just wanted to supplement their onsite inventory by being able to compare items and pricing across a large number of external distributors – allowing them to purchase inventory at the lowest cost, and to expand their web sales by including items from inventory that isn’t in-house. BNC created a web-based tool where they could look up items across all available vendor sources and aid them in order at the lowest cost and highest profit on every transaction.
This was just the beginning. Many of the distributors allow electronic ordering – but each with their own set of rules and technology to handle inventory updates, ordering, invoicing and shipping. BNC worked closely with our client and these third-party distributors to create custom e-commerce handling for each of these disparate systems – unified into a single web-based portal on the client side. Our client could now select items from any active distributor and have the orders automatically generated and tracked through to completion.
Phase Two
Next we added the capability to retrieve web-based orders placed on their website, and automatically process them from the lowest cost distributor source – sometimes all items would be fulfilled by one distributor, and sometimes a single order would be fulfilled by multiple distributors. After fulfillment – the tracking information is sent back to the website, closing out the process. The end result is a system where almost all ordering, fulfillment, and tracking is now completely automated. Manual orders can be placed to replenish or add new items to the in-house inventory, but the only orders that require manual intervention are unpaid orders, orders with special handling needs, or when there is no inventory on hand to fulfill an item that was requested.
Results
The system has resulted in cost savings, reduced shipping costs, greater profits per sale, and a much reduced management workload for the eCommerce staff, enabling them to spend more time on all of the other tasks needed to manage a successful eCommerce business.
Next – we will be moving the website to an entirely new eCommerce platform – and adding even more capability. Stay tuned…
Reach out to BNC if your organization could benefit from custom software/application development.
