Does this sound like you? Do you find the manual processes you started your business with aren’t keeping up with your production and orders? Do you find you’re out of stock all too regularly? Are you struggling to manage your pricing between retail and wholesale? Are your team spending too much time double or triple entering data in different systems? Do you dream of seeing your stock on hand in real-time?

Rest assured, you’re not alone. Most of our clients come to us because they find themselves in exactly the same position. They’re working their proverbial butts off, only to feel like they’re treading water. Sales are increasing but they are working harder than ever in the business, not on it.

Growth is a good problem to have, but sometimes, old processes don’t grow alongside the sales.

What if I told you, you could dramatically improve your bottom line, minimise waste, improve your negotiating power with suppliers and get your weekends back?  And you could do it all cost-effectively?

It doesn’t have to be just a pipe dream, it can be your reality.

It has certainly become a reality for our clients, Georgina Larby and Alice Storey from Pure Pops. Pure Pops make healthy, delicious frozen icy-poles for kids and grown-ups alike. They’re as preservative and sugar-free as possible and absolutely delectable.

Georgina and Alice spent a long time perfecting their recipes but after a couple of years, they found themselves with a burgeoning business that was outpacing the spreadsheets they used to manage stock levels and production. They had an increasing variety of recipes to manage, ingredients to source, packaging to order, batches to track and shipments to prepare. They were working overtime and growing nicely, but no matter how many times they heard; “but your own business is always a 24/7 adventure” they knew, deep down, there was a better way.

Unleashed software was a great fit for Pure Pops, it delivered a solution that exactly matched their requirements. They buy raw materials; fruit, milk, cream and packaging items, sticks and wrappers to produce icy-poles and then sell and despatch them all around the country. Trying to track everything, including recipes and batches, without having an inventory management system in place is really, really difficult.

“When you start your business with spreadsheets – it’s fine because you don’t have that much to track, but when you start talking ‘000’s of items or tonnes of materials then you really do need something more sophisticated,” says Alice.

Implementing Unleashed for Pure Pops transformed their business in more ways than they could imagine. Yes, they stopped manually entering data in three different systems (accounts, CRM and freight). Yes, they were able to see their stock in real-time and yes, their stock outages were eliminated. But these are all things that you’d expect to come from an inventory management system. It was also so much more than that, though.

They got greater insights into their minimum and maximum stock ordering, with low stock alert triggers.  This meant they could confidently order the right quantity of stock and significantly reduce spoilage and waste.

Knowing exactly what they need and when they needed it meant they could also better negotiate wholesale and freight pricing with suppliers to improve product profitability.

This, in turn, enabled them to make better production decisions. For example; the quality and price of watermelon are at its best in the Australian summer. Buying Watermelon in winter in preparation for summer was both more expensive and less flavoursome so they were able to schedule the manufacturing to take advantage of both better pricing and quality fruit.

“Whilst there is an investment upfront, the cost of implementation was negligible compared to the savings and efficiencies that have resulted from it. Having Cloudsolve on board with us was invaluable. We tried to implement it ourselves, initially but bringing Cloudsolve onboard to drive it for us really changed the game. We get so much more value than we could ever have imagined” said Georgina.

So stop dreaming, you too can live the dream!

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Top 5 Tips for Inventory Management:

1) Eliminate double handling of data‍

Stop rekeying invoices into multiple systems.

2) See your stock in real-time

Never run out of ingredients or packaging again.

3) Improve your cash flow

Reducing overstocked products puts cashback in your bank account.

4) Improve the efficiency of your production

Plan your production around seasonal availability, international deliveries or despatch requirements.

5) Improve your profitability

With all the facts at your disposal, you can negotiate better rates with suppliers and improve your margin.