United Pacific Industries recently reassessed its vision and strategy with the company deciding that it needed to create a new B2C channel that would enable it to sell its Thermoskin products directly to consumers. As a result, the company decided to create a new website built on Shopify, but needed this to connect to SYSPRO.
Historically, our business has mainly been selling our products into pharmacies. We sell through wholesalers, who then sell them to individual pharmacies. However, when COVID happened, we looked at our business strategy for the next five years and we realised we are heavily reliant on the pharmacy channel. Therefore, one of our biggest objectives was to diversify our channels, explained Fenella Brown, Marketing Manager, United Pacific Industries.
As a result, we decided to create a direct to consumer channel via eCommerce for our Thermoskin product. For this to work, we needed to connect our existing ERP system, SYSPRO, to our new website built on Shopify. My biggest challenge was trying to find something that would help connect those two systems together. Without that connection it would significantly impact the admin staff in terms of their workload managing the inventory, orders and pricing etc.
Having selected BPA Platform as the integration solution between SYSPRO and the new Shopify website, BPA Platform is now automating a number of data transfers between the two systems. This includes running a query into SYSPRO on a daily basis, selecting only the Thermoskin products, and then exporting the pricing and stock availability from SYSPRO to Shopify. Customer accounts, as well as partial or full cancellation of orders, refunds, or returns, are also synchronised.
Additionally, BPA Platform is also responsible for the synchronisation of all sales orders from the Shopify web store to SYSPRO. BPA Platform monitors Shopify every five minutes and any orders received are imported into SYSPRO as sales order documents. BPA Platform has also been configured to monitor SYSPRO for orders that have been dispatched and updates Shopify accordingly with details of fulfilment and proof of delivery, which Shopify then uses to notify the customers.
The main thing that BPA Platform is doing is automatically pulling through all of the new direct consumer orders from the website into SYSPRO. From an admin perspective, that has removed a lot of the manual work that was occurring, especially as it is a two-way process in terms of the information we are managing, said Fenella Brown.
Previously we were just processing a couple of large orders a week. However, the new website is generating 200-250 orders a month on average. So you can imagine what that workload would be like if our admin staff were having to manually put those through every time. Everything is just more cohesive and it takes away the opportunity for any potential error.
We consider SYSPRO as our source of truth. Although the website is holding all of the live information for certain brands, any changes to pricing, stock etc. all happens in SYSPRO. Now that its connected to our new website we know that we can make the changes and everything will flow through seamlessly.
As well as enabling United Pacific Industries to realise its new business strategy much faster than was expected, deploying BPA Platform has also enabled the business to look at expanding its online presence, including new websites and a wholesale portal.
Without connecting SYSPRO to these new websites, we may not be where we are today. Its been a very needed part of that process. BPA Platform basically sped up the ability to launch our website. We have also been able to launch a couple of other websites for our much smaller brands, said Fenella Brown.
Were looking at adding a wholesale portal on the new website that weve launched targeting professionals in the allied health space so that they can buy products at a wholesale price. Were working with SYSPRO and Codeless Platforms to understand what that would look like and how it would work. Thats really something that probably wouldnt have even been a consideration for us if we hadnt rolled out this project. BPA Platform is opening more doors for us.
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