“Orderhive has become an integral part of our company and we have noticed a significant increase in our efficiency in managing our warehouses as well as clients using it. They understood our problems and quite tactfully made custom changes in their software to comply with our needs.”
– CTO, Vusumuzi Lehlongoane
Smollan’s background
Smollan is an international retail solution provider with its headquarters in South Africa. The company is providing consistent excellence in operational execution to the retailers and manufacturers since the last three generations, established in 1931.
Smollan is best known for ensuring perfect representation of the products on the shelf, in-store merchandising, and inventory management. Delivering the best of the client’s brand promise to its customers is at the heart of the organization. Therefore, the company is committed to giving actionable insights on category management, dashboard reporting, and custom mobility solutions to its clients.
David Smollan, the CEO remarks that:
“Companies should think of us as an execution engine for some of the below-the-line ideas they might have. We link up the marketing discipline and the sales discipline in a more horizontal way.”
Challenges/ obstacles faced by Smollan
Smollan has come a long way since being a traditional sales agency in 1931 to now a full-fledged retail solutions provider.
However, with increasing clientele, it becomes challenging to provide top-notch warehouse facilities to all the retailers for storing their inventory. Since the warehouse are big and several retailers share the space within the warehouse, Smollan found it difficult to keep a tab on space utilization of various brands, companies, zone, categories, etc.in a warehouse. Here are a few of the main challenges that were faced by the company:
- Difficulty in tracking and maintaining the stock transfer across multiple warehouses.
- Difficulty in calculating the amount of space utilized by the inventory per retailer store or manufacturer.
- Preparing an individual report for each retailer’s inventory and its stock transfer is another challenging aspect of warehousing business which Smollan wanted to sort out.
- The company was looking for a solution to get easy reporting and detailed space utilization report of their warehouses located in multiple locations.
Innovative Solution by Orderhive
While Smollan was looking for a solution to overcome their challenges, Orderhive came to its rescue. Orderhive is a SAAS based cloud software solution for managing inventory, warehouse, and orders for retailers as well as manufacturers.
“Orderhive has solved 60% of our operational troubles with their advanced solution. We can easily calculate and bill our clients by just pressing a few buttons. It has helped us immensely while we concentrated on growing our business globally,” says the CTO, Vusumuzi Lehlongoane.
Orderhive is not just helping them with keeping a record of inventory but is also enabling them to ease out their billing and reporting process.
Apart from the conventional inventory management, Smollan now takes advantage of Orderhive’s advanced functionality of capturing the space utilization on their customer details page. The software has made it possible for Smollan to churn out a master bill for its customers with respect to the contract space and value per square meter and on a weekly or monthly basis.
- Orderhive has made several customizations that have eased the process of billing.
Orderhive efficiently creates bills on a weekly basis with a simple click on the customer details page. It gives the bill on the basis of the number of pallets on the floor, the number of pallets on the rack, and total space occupied by a client on each week of the month.
- Access levels customization feature for each individual client
Orderhive allows Smollan to access a particular client’s details of space occupied in a particular zone of the warehouse. Since there are multiple zones in the warehouse, it becomes difficult but with this functionality, Smollan can divide the zones as per their client’s brands, company, category, division, etc.
The Result
Smollan is now powered by a customized warehouse management system that enables them to perform essential tasks like tracking space utilization, billing the clients on the basis of the space occupied by them in the warehouse efficiently. It has automated its operational processes in several aspects of warehouse management across the globe.
