See how PCI garage manages its growing business with AltheaSuite

Introduction

PCI garagesale is a well-established firm in Freeport, New York. Their business revolves around purchasing a huge range of products at liquidation and then selling them on Amazon, ebay, and other e-commerce channels. Their inventory is spread across multiple online platforms and has an enormous warehouse where all the orders are processed from. The company believes in implementing simple and easy to use solutions that collectively helps them to manage the huge inventory at hand. 

Initial Challenges they encountered

PCI GarageSale was looking for a simple inventory management solution that could reduce their everyday concerns of going through elaborate workflows to add the incoming inventory after the liquidation process. Being present on multiple online platforms gave the company a huge boost in terms of the customer orders coming in but also increased the stress to manage all of these platforms collectively.

UPC Code Scanning

They wanted a solution that could give them the capability to scan UPC codes and upload the name of the item, an image of the product, and the quantity into the system. This was required at the time of uploading the Stock into the Warehouse. There was also a highly critical requirement to have the same ability of UPC Code scanning through their Mobile Devices. 

Batch Management

All products that were coming into the warehouse were received in certain Lots/Batches. There was a vehicle number that also needed to be tracked with every stock upload along with the date of upload. This was very essential to identify while looking back at the available inventory. 

WooCommerce and Marketplace Integration

The current website that they were using was set up on the WooCommerce platform. Since the majority of their sales coming in was through ebay and Amazon marketplace hence they critically required software that could integrate all aspects in terms of order processing and stock management with their website.

Re-Order Management with Item Location Tracking

There is always unrest in terms of understanding what quantities of stock are required to be ordered from the warehouse based on the usage across multiple platforms. On top of this, the order processing team always found it difficult to locate the requested products for an order in the warehouse which consequently increased the order fulfillment time.

In-Built Accounting System

PCI was already using QuickBooks as an Accounting Software for all of their financial books. The functions of QuickBooks were sufficient however everything was very disconnected since they had to use a 3-rd party tool to manage accounts. This was in no way linked to their POS transactions/purchasing transactions or other financial transactions. It would be great if they were able to bring all of this under one platform.

The Solution

After the introduction of AltheaSuite, the PCI garagesale team was able to visualize how seamlessly they could now shorten the time taken in redundant business processes. Since everything related to their business management was now under one roof they found it very convenient to navigate from one workflow to the other. This also led to a consolidated evaluation of all business data from all online platforms which further had substantial benefits to it.

  • AltheaSuite team integrated the UPC Lookup functionality with pre-existing online databases of UPC codes. This helped PCI to quickly scan the UPC code of the item using their Mobile phone/barcode scanner and create the product in the inventory without manually specifying the Item name, Image category, price, etc. This made the work of the stock upload team incredibly easy as now they just needed to scan the UPC code and add the quantity being received.
  • While uploading the Stock, AltheaSuite gave their team the ability to also add the Batch/LOT number and expiration dates of the incoming stock with the respective entry. Since a lot of these items being received were perishable in nature so now they could internally understand what amount of stock was expiring when. This enabled them to track the complete lifecycle of a product back to its origin while looking at the inventory.
  • We were able to integrate their current website with AltheaSuite backend. This enabled all orders placed on their WooCommerce  and on the different market places to be seen in AltheaSuite in real-time. This also ensured that the stock got automatically reduced based on the order placed and the customer information got stored in Althea’s CRM for future marketing purposes. So their team now saw all orders coming in from their website along with all in-store placed orders in one place.
  • With Althea’s Re-Order Management Module, PCI was able to set minimum and maximum reorder rules for their items. Every time the stock of certain items went below those minimum levels, it triggered email/text notifications to their team. It also further helped them to interlink reorder management with the PO creation.
  • While receiving the stock PCI team was able to add the item’s physical location in the warehouse which paved the way for quicker order processing since they could be now easily found in the warehouse.
  • AltheaSuite has an in-built Accounting Software that logs all the financial transactions associated with sales, purchasing, returns, etc. They are now looking to switch to AltheaSuite from Quickbooks for their Bookkeeping needs since along with all other things they are able to manage the Accounting under the same umbrella.

The SuCcess

After vigorously working with the PCI team, AltheaSuite was able to tweak the software based on their specific business needs. This completely shortened their staff’s learning curve and their team were able to migrate to AltheaSuite in a very short span of time. The robustness and convenience of use(specifically the ability to use the complete application on their iPhones) gave them great confidence going forward.

AltheaSuite team also plans to integrate with their other online marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay etc soon so they essentially can manage all business processes inside AltheaSuite itself. The quick pace in implementing all of this has left a formidable impression on PCI management and they look forward to recommending more customers to join AltheaSuite clientele.

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