Business Goals
The US furniture industry is highly competitive, with retailers constantly looking for ways to stand out and capture market share. Our client is a leading furniture retailer with a strong reputation for quality and affordability. With multiple locations across the country, they offer a wide range of furniture products to suit any budget and style. However, like many retailers, they faced challenges with inefficient processes, inventory management issues and manual data entry. They needed a solution to automate and streamline their operations.
In an effort to achieve that, they turned to NetSuite, a cloud-based ERP solution. Even though NetSuite implementation brought discipline and efficiency to their operations, they were still unable to track inventory in real-time across multiple locations, automate ordering and replenishment of stocks.
In this case study, we’ll explore how NeosAlpha’s Enterprise Application Services practice helped them successfully leverage the customizable features of NetSuite to improve their operations and drive business growth.
How NeosAlpha Helped
Our functional consultants, who have extensive experience working with various retailers and e-commerce businesses started off reviewing the client’s ways of working, their custom business processes and specifically their procurement processes, inventory management, logistics and warehousing. In parallel, our ERP consultants did a detailed assessment of their NetSuite implementation and documented the use cases which could be automated. During the playback back session, our team presented a collated view of the retailer’s current state, the pain points and areas of improvement.
Our client had been managing inventory across 3 warehouses within the US. And their product catalogue was over 400 SKUs. Whenever there was a change in the stock level across all their warehouses, they wanted the synchronization to happen in real time so that the online marketplace doesn’t oversell or undersell products. The primary reasons for a stock level change were returns, outbound shipment for order fulfilment and transfer orders between warehouses.
We architected a cost-effective solution by using NetSuite’s RESTlets, an extension of SuiteScript API which allows custom integrations with NetSuite. RESTlets support OAuth2.0, and JSON content type and can be tailored for a specific need.
- RESTlets enabled custom integrations between various Warehouse Management Systems (WMS) and ensured that data is transferred accurately and securely.
- RESTlets were called by SuiteScripts and also external applications for pushing data into the NetSuite platform.
- Triggers for automated workflows through RESTlets were enabled.
Results
Our NetSuite customisation solution using RESTlets helped the client re-define their entire inventory management,
- Inventory control in real time helped the client to optimize inventory levels at each location based on demand.
- They were able to restock quickly and plan logistics efficiently across multiple locations.
- Business stakeholders had full visibility into inventory levels and were able to gain valuable insights.
- Improve supply chain workflows. Fulfilled order statuses and shipping details were available in NetSuite immediately.
