FASHION – SALES ORDER & DISTRIBUTION
Carol C Collections are one of the UKs leading ladies’ fashion distributors, supplying exclusive clothing ranges to hundreds of independent boutiques across the UK and Ireland.
Carol C Collections were introduced to Vardells via Boutique Magazine, as a technology business they knew and trusted.
THE ISSUE
During the seasonal buying periods the business actively attends trade shows and visits retail boutiques, showcasing next seasons designs and taking orders from new and existing clients.
The problems we were asked to solve were very clear:
- All sales orders were on handwritten purchase forms
- Email was used to send scanned orders
- Head office then manually keyed the sales order onto the ordering system
- When stock arrived, allocation to stores was a manual process
Resulting in lengthy unwanted administration, and unavoidable human error.
HOW WE HELPED
Using a combination of VMR ENTERPRISE Order Management & WMS, and RETAILCONNECT our B2B ecommerce solution, we were able to totally transform their operational processes.
VMR ENTERPRISE was used as the master data repository for customers, suppliers and products. A B2B commerce portal was created to enable the sales team to create an online order when visiting stores, also using the portal to show images of clothing being worn to compliment their samples. Access to the customers account is seamless and orders are sent to head office immediately, dramatically cutting the salespersons paperwork by 100%.
Orders flow through from the portal automatically creating and collating Purchase Orders to be placed with the appropriate suppliers/manufacturers at the end of the buying season.
When stock arrives in, it is dynamically matched to the Sales Order for each store, allocating the stock in priority order and creating the picking list for warehouse team to arrange the dispatch to store.
All the necessary financial information is now seamlessly synchronised with the existing accountancy system for invoicing, and reports and dashboards provide important analytics and insight into the sales trends of product SKUs in different regions.