Take a whirlwind romance, 36,000 olive trees on a family farm, and Australia’s growing love for quality olive oil, and Rich Glen has become an important part of the country’s culinary scene.
Rich Glen was established on family land in the early 1990s by Damien Vodusek, a skilled butcher, and his father Franc. When Damien married Ros, a trained chef, they saw huge potential in distributing quality olive oils to a market saturated by cheap imports.
Angelica Morse has been with Rich Glen since 2013, since the company was built around the grove, a farm shop selling cake and coffee, and a team making dressings a liter at a time in a Thermomix. A lot has changed since then. Angelica has gone from managing staff and product production, to overseeing operations – and she’s seen the production side slowly increase throughputs to the point where they’re now using a 200 liter machine to make world-class dressings. In the last couple of years, she’s also been leading the charge for a new ERP for Rich Glen, working alongside SMB Consultants to deliver a solution that would enable them to do what they do best with stunning local produce.
Substantial growth over the last three decades has meant Rich Glen has reached new heights and met new challenges with every passing year.
As Angelica explains, they’ve created a range of dressings, started a farm shop and café – and until 2019, there were no signs of slowing down.
“The café just kept expanding, and the farm shop became open to the public. The ranges kept on evolving: from six dressings, it’s now gone to almost 200 products made on the farm, including both skincare and food products. We’re using the olive oil, as well as local produce like tomatoes to make relishes, and plums to make the barbeque sauce. We were getting 400+ visitors coming through each weekend, and had 20-30 staff helping us out. My role was to narrow down where Rich Glen wanted to head, and then get going in that direction.”
But there was one part of the business that needed fixing before the vision could become reality: the operational systems.
“Our accounting software could only be used by one person, and they had to actually be on the farm to see what was happening. If you had any questions about sales, you had to ask the office manager or bookkeeper – nobody else could get access to it, because of how it was set up. And then each of the production managers were running their own versions of the accounting software to try to help with managing stock levels. So if you had any questions on inventory or anything like that, you had to email or call them and ask. It was all over the show.”
“Plus we had the café, and we were looking at doing bookings for tours at the olive farm – we wanted all these things to happen. But there wasn’t one system that could fit everything. And we didn’t know how to integrate it all together.”
Fortunately, a Queensland contact suggested they speak to SMB Consultants – the experts in ERP systems and integrating complex parts across manufacturing, sales integration and reporting.
SMB Consultants have been able to work with Rich Glen over the last few years. This first exercise was to implement a cloud-based point of sale, inventory and customer data system that would help relieve some pressure.
As Jeff Atizado, Joint Managing Director at SMB Consultants, explains, “Rich Glen is a multifaceted business – certainly with the café, the making of their products and a bit of manufacturing. It was difficult to find a ‘one size fits all’ option that would suit.”
Instead, SMB Consultants started considering a diverse suite of products that would suit Rich Glen’s needs, built around a few core tools. That included accounting software Xero – even though their accountant provided some initial push-back against this tool.
“Many people believe that one package or software needs to be able to meet all their needs – and while that’s ideal, it means you miss out on the possibility of creating a better solution by piecing together great parts. This is why some people stick with legacy solutions, even when there’s an ideal combination of tools, integrated and functioning as one, waiting for them.”
Jeff and Deepak Stevens, Sales Implementation Engineer with SMB Consultants, worked with Angelica to implement Vend, an in-store management platform for retailers, as ‘stage one’ change, with Xero providing the basis for the accounting components. And while that itself was successful, Rich Glen wanted something more – something that could also connect the relatively siloed parts of the business. What they needed was a total package.
Fortunately, there was light at the end of the tunnel.
The changes of circumstances meant that SMB Consultants and Rich Glen had the chance to reevaluate their software stack too.
“When we were talking about this second phase, we had to make a decision as to whether or not we went down the path of implementing Vend together with Cin7 Core [formerly DEAR Systems], because there was a turnkey integration there,” Jeff notes. “Or for Rich Glen to take a step back and re-evaluate the business as a whole, and see whether going down the path of using Cin7 Core as an all-in-one would be a better decision.”
Deepak oversaw both phases of work with Rich Glen, starting in 2019, and has been able to see the impact of this fresh perspective.
“There was a whole aspect of reordering and manufacturing which they weren’t able to handle on Vend,” Deepak says. “And since they were looking more at manufacturing, they needed a better solution. Cin7 Core was going to be the right platform to begin the manufacturing process – which is really important to what they do within Rich Glen.”
Many people believe that one package or software needs to be able to meet all their needs – and while that’s ideal, it means you miss out on the possibility of creating a better solution by piecing together great parts.
Among the goals for SMB Consultants and Rich Glen were managing the complex parts of manufacturing and sales. They needed a solution that was suitable for a business of their size, and that would help them track the individual parts of their business and operations so they could make better business decisions based on real data. In particular, they needed a high visibility of inventory levels, B2B capabilities, clean inventory management – and easily handle the change-over to the new system.
As Angelica explains, their previous set-up was good for sales, but lacked communication to the inventory system, which created more work in reconciling inventory levels and managing stock. “The staff would be trying to order stuff that might’ve been out of stock and then they would be constantly trying to reorder it from the warehouse to get brought up to the stores. We had no visibility.”
The existing loyalty, email and SMS marketing tool Marsello, which had integrated into Vend, had worked well – so the first part of implementation was to carry that over and integrate it into Cin7 Core instead. From there, the rest of operations slowly moved across.
“Now we use Cin7 Core for all our inventory management, so that’s for all our stock levels,” explains Angelica. “We closed the café, and closed the farm to the public, and instead opened two retail stores in town. One’s solely a food retail store, and one’s a skincare retail store. Cin7 Core needed to manage our online orders, the point of sale for both stores, and stock levels for production.”
In addition, SMB Consultants set Rich Glen up with Pinch to manage payments, Starshipit for order fulfillment, and Xero for all the accounting – a deft software stack that has supported the organization well.
In addition, Deepak adds, Angelica can also begin to use Cin7 Core to forecast accurately, and create clear manufacturing processes within the business, as well as get better stock transparency and manage internal workflows better.
“We’re also coming up to a point where we’re talking about implementing a forecasting system called StockTrim that’s going to give them next-level forecasting for all of this manufacturing that’s going on within the business. It’ll also improve their cash flow and help the team manage stock and reordering from their side. It’s a massive improvement in just a year – and a lot better than what they could have achieved under their old system.”
Going for this refreshed approach has given Angelica and Rich Glen the chance to work more on the business, rather than in it, and reach some of those vital long-term goals.
It’s early days for quantifiable metrics – and the team are still learning the ropes – but Angelica is ecstatic with the results so far.
“What we’ve gained is immeasurable and invaluable, and the data has been fantastic from a managerial perspective, and from the owners’ perspective, to be able to log on and see what’s happening. It’s just made our decision making much better in terms of what promotions we’re running.”
“If we have a surplus of stock, we can make better decisions and say, ‘Look, this stock, we need to move it. We need to put it on sale, or we need to run a promotion,’ things like that. We didn’t have that visibility before, and having that now has been fantastic. It’s made communication across the business much, much better.”
“The team has loved the changes. The workflow is now really easy, whether it’s for a customer or a B2B custom client wanting to change an order. If they call us, we can change orders – it’s just a much better workflow for the team.”
Angelica says she’s loved working with SMB Consultants for the second time – even noting how much more organized the process has felt on the re-implementation of an ERP suite.
“I’ve loved working with them. It’s been great because SMB takes the guesswork out of it; they really help you and way past the implementation process. If you’re unsure where to go or what to use, what software to use, then they’ll help you look into your business and work with you to find out what’s the best solution for you.”
Jeff adds that it’s been an incredibly rewarding experience, having Angelica and Rich Glen trust SMB Consultants for the second time.
“Angelica’s just such a great client to work with. She’s so willing to work together with you and to be open in terms of reevaluating workflows and she invests the time into documenting those workflows. So I think the process has been mutually positive in terms of how we’ve arrived at a solution that is going to be improving the areas that she was looking to fix.”
“It was a catalyst for us to really look at what we were doing – to circle back, continue that relationship, and really do all the things that we could do. We’ve also changed our processes as a result, taking on some of Angelica’s early feedback and improving our processes internally.”
“There’s a list of things we’re working on to free up Angelica’s time, like looking at inventory planning software StockTrim – and, more importantly, keep Rich Glen in line with their goals, and give Angelica more time to spend time with her family. That, to me, is really rewarding and satisfying. I’m really proud of Deepak and team, and what they’ve done with Rich Glen.”
Founder,
SMB Consultants
Sales Implementation Engineer,
SMB Consultants
Rich Glen Olive Oil
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