At first it didn’t seem like Cin7 Omni would work out – but thanks to SMB Consultants, Skyphonez has a cloud-based inventory management and ERP system without peer
Sometimes, things come full circle. For Skyphonez, Cin7 Omni seemed the best choice for their inventory management – their director had worked there, after all, and knew what it could do. But Cin7 said it wasn’t sure they were the best solution for their needs. So Skyphonez enlisted the help of SMB Consultants – and it turned out that the perfect solution had been with them all along.
Skyphonez is an Australian-based seller of new and refurbished smartphones and other technology products, with an online store and multiple other sales channels. With so many places their stock could be purchased from, and little in the way of integrations or management, Skyphones was heavily exposed to the risk of overselling – an absolute disaster for an online retailer.
Stephen Gill, Skyphonez Director, was sure Cin7 Omni was the go-to to fix this problem. After all, he’d worked at Cin7 for quite a while. But with close to 100,000 SKUs across the board, Cin7 were worried it was too big, and that Skyphonez would hit the limits of Cin7 Omni’s capability. “They said it wouldn’t work what we needed it for,” says Gill.
This was a blow, because the only other option was a costly custom-developed ERP. However, when Gill tested it, that was no solution either: “It was disconnected from absolutely everything… and it made no sense.” Over five years, it would have cost more than Cin7 Omni, it wasn’t cloud-based, and it needed a huge amount of work to get it to where Skyphonez needed it to be.
WAT is the answer
So Skyphonez was referred to SMB Consultants, who thought there could in fact be potential with Cin7. SMB’s first step was to facilitate a series of Workflow Acceptance Testing (WAT) workshops, in which they explored different ways to store product information and compare the variations accepted by each marketplace.
The process required a lot of care, remembers SMB Consultants CEO and Co-Founder Jeffrey Atizado. “We were very apprehensive about recommending a product, which we knew had a known system limitation, where on the surface it looked like you could easily hit the SKU limit. So we used the WAT sessions to work through a solution [and] were able to reduce the number of SKUs to the point where it wasn’t a limitation any more.”
And this completely changed the game for Skyphonez, says Gill. “It helped us to understand about the different structures that were possible within Cin7 Omni and allowed us to figure out for ourselves [what format would work].” With the new mapping, he doesn’t believe that Skyphonez will ever hit Cin7 Omni’s SKU limit of 50,000. “Never. No chance.”
Instead of simply aggregating the existing data, Skyphonez worked with SMB Consultants to recreate all their products from scratch. “That allowed us to ensure that any new variant we created was 100 percent unique.”
“Cin7 Omni takes care of itself 99 percent of the time now”
Thanks to SMB Consultants, Cin7 Omni turned out to be a perfect solution. It’s “ready out of the box”, says Gill. Now that Cin7 Omni can calculate both stock reduction and availability, Skyphonez has much more control over stock control and is no longer exposed to the risk of overselling. “It takes care of itself 99 percent of the time now.”
Not only that, but Gill says the company is saving many thousands of dollars in staff costs, now that control and stocktake is no longer such a manual process. “It’s a lot of money per year that we’re saving by doing it this way.”
One of the surprises of SMB Consultants’ solution for Skyphonez was retaining integrations that they were on the verge of getting rid of. While Skyphonez runs native stores on eBay and WooCommerce, the stock syncs directly with ChannelAdvisor, which integrates a huge number of channels – Amazon, Catch, My Sale, Shopify, Fulfilled by Amazon, mydeal, Kogan, The Market, Trademe, Wish, and OZSALE. Initially the company was going to exclusively use Cin7 Omni, but with nine channels already connected to ChannelAdvisor the efficiency of a one-to-many approach was obvious. Atizado calls it a case of “thinking outside the box”. By leveraging the things that ChannelAdvisor was already doing well, “it ended up being a great workaround.”
Gill is unequivocal that the support from SMB Consultants and other Cin7 partners was crucial. As a former employee of Cin7 he was already very experienced with the platform, and knew what might be possible, but it wasn’t until connecting with SMB that the magic began to happen.
His advice to other business owners who are thinking of trying to integrate inventory management software all on their own? “Get some help. It's an incredibly complex task to get all of this together into one single place, and to have it working the way it's supposed to do, or the way it's supposed to. You can’t do it yourself.”
Overview: Skyphonez works with SMB Consultants to make Cin7 Omni the perfect ERP solution for their growing business
Before SMB Consultants
- Skyphonez were battling multiple sales channels to manage their products and stock
- Lack of integrations and limitations to their existing system meant they were heavily exposed to overselling
- Cin7 – their first choice – were worried Cin7 Omni wouldn’t be a viable solution
- A custom-developed ERP was prohibitively costly and still wouldn’t do what they needed
- Eventually, Skyphonez was referred to SMB Consultants, who used creative thinking and problem-solving to discover how to make Cin7 Omni the ideal solution
Objectives
- Find the ideal stock control and inventory management solution for Skyphonez
- Run a series of WAT (Workflow Acceptance Testing) workshops to explore different ways to store information and compare variations for the different channels
- Reduce the number of SKUs to stay within Cin7 Omni’s limits
Software & Integration Stack
- Cin7 Omni
- Shopify
- Xero
- ChannelAdvisor
- eBay
- WooCommerce
- Amazon
- Catch
- My Sale
- Fulfilled by Amazon
- Mydeal
- Kogan
- The Market
- Trademe
- Wish
- OZSALE
Results
- Skyphonez are now able to use Cin7 Omni, just as they’d hoped. Not only is their exposure to overselling no longer a concern, they’ve also saved thousands of dollars on manual entry and stocktaking.
- Cin7 Omni integrated directly with ChannelAdvisor
- Massive cost savings – thousands per month in staff savings and efficiency gains
- Cloud-based system provides a single source of truth accessible from anywhere
