Sometimes, things come full circle. For Skyphonez, Cin7 Omni seemed the best choice for their inventory management – their Operations Manager 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, Operations Manager for Skyphonez, 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 Stephen.
This was a blow, because the only other option was a costly custom-developed ERP. However, when Stephen 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.
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 Jeff 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 Stephen. “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.”
There were, Stephen says, some concerns from both management and staff around the cost of the implementation and how employees would manage with the news systems, but Steve together with SMB Consultants were able to show that the benefits should vastly outweigh any issues. “I provided some basic customer service data, customer complaint data, loss values and, and we used that.”
"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 Stephen. Now that Cin7 Omni can calculate both stock reduction and availability, Skyphonez has much more control over, well, stock control, and is no longer so terrifyingly exposed to the risk of overselling. The relief from this sea change has washed over the entire business. “Before SMB Consultants, we felt a lot of frustration and confusion. Now, there’s a feeling of relief and productivity. The system takes care of itself 99 percent of the time now,” Stephen says.
Not only that, but Stephen 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. Jeff 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.”
Stephen 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. In fact, he’s unequivocal that Skyphonez’s transformation would not have been possible without them: “If not for SMB, we’d still be working on implementing the software, and likely still be working out basic kinks in processes.”
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. You can’t do it yourself – but with the right solution, virtually anything is possible.”
Is the result worth more to their business than what they paid in fees and software costs?
“Yes, definitely. It has changed the way we operate completely.”
Founder, SMB Consultants
Operations Manager, Skyphonez
Sales & Implementation Engineer,
SMB Consultants
Xero Integration Specialist,
SMB Consultants
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