Willis Enterprises
The Challenge
Willis Enterprises are based in the UK and sell ecig products. They have several stores across the UK that use Epos Now as their Point of Sale platform. They also sell online on Amazon, eBay and OnBuy.
They needed a way to manage all their online listings, inventory and orders centrally. The inventory needed to be kept in sync with Epos Now and all online orders needed to be pushed into Epos Now so that all the sales data was available in Epos Now. The benefit of having all the sales data available in Epos Now is that we could then start analysing the data to find trends and surface insights.
One of the biggest pain points that they had was that their ordering process was taking too long and they invariably ended up with too much or too little of a particular product on the shelf. They wanted to analyse the sales data to help them define the min/max levels of products that they should have on the shelves which would in turn make it much easier to create and manage purchase orders in Epos Now to ensure the correct amounts were being ordered.
Our Solution
We built an integration between Linnworks and Epos Now for them which kept their inventory and orders in sync on both systems. We helped them setup Linnworks to connect into the Amazon, eBay and OnBuy sales channels.
Linnworks fetches all the orders from these external channels and creates them as orders in Linnworks. We then pick up the Linnworks orders and sync them to Epos Now.
Any inventory updates in Epos Now are also synced to Linnworks in almost real time which then pushes out these inventory updates to all the channels it is connected to.
Now that we had all the sales data in Epos Now, we could start leveraging the built in purchase order functionality to its potential. We extended our integration to allow the client to set the sales period that we should look at for each product category and supplier. This was determined by supplier lead times among other factors. Our integration analyses the sales data in Epos Now, for each location, and runs the algorithms we have developed to work out the min/max values for each product, in each location in Epos Now, based on the sales period defined.
With the min/max values being set accurately and constantly fine-tuned by our algorithm based on the sales data, the purchase order functionality in Epos Now then allowed the client to pre-populate purchase orders as they were needed, in the quantities required, without needing manual calculation and data entry. This integration is saving time and money and has allowed Willis Enterprises to concentrate on scaling their business.
