Case Study

How I Saved A Business 20 Hours A Week By Improving Their Purchasing Process

Automation
By Joel Klease · December 2019

Soundcorp are an AV integrator and pro audio retailer that deals with thousands of products from many suppliers around Australia. Before placing purchase orders with suppliers, back-office staff were required to check each individual item in their ERP to ensure correct pricing was sent. This resulted in countless hours of manual work that needed to be done each week by staff, as well as increasing the occurrence of human error.

I created a tool to ingest price lists from the various suppliers, clean and transform the data, and then automatically update the pricing in Soundcorp's ERP. The tool was able to deal with thousands of items at a time while still being user-friendly for staff with non-technical backgrounds.

Keeping Products Up To Date

The tool would reference the product codes in the supplier's pricelist against a field in the ERP to check if it existed already. If it did, it would generate a file to update the pricing which would be uploaded to their ERP. If the product did not exist, it would generate a different file to import the new products into the ERP. In the case where the product was missing, a report would be generated to allow for manual handling.

This allowed thousands of items at a time to be either updated or created, as well as catching any products that fell through the cracks.

Reports That Generate Revenue

Along with these import files, a report was also generated to show how much the pricing had changed for a particular product. These reports were used by management to keep en eye on changes in prices from suppliers across thousands of items and change sell prices quickly and effortlessly. If prices went up or down, the business was able to react swiftly to stay on top of pricing trends and increase revenue.

Conclusion

The tool resulted in at least 20 hours saved per week and it allowed thousands of items to be updated or created at a time - something that was not previously possible by the staff at Soundcorp. This meant that the staff was able to focus on other business-critical tasks. The added reporting functionality enabled staff to act promptly on any price changes, resulting in the company both saving money and making more profits.

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