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Order Management and Enterprise Systems
Stone Edge Technologies, IncThe Stone Edge Order Managerwww.stoneedge.com Category: Order Management System John Frazar Sales Manager One Valley Square, Suite 130 Blue Bell, PA 19422 215-641-1837 sales@stoneedge.com Case Study: Kate’s Caring Gifts "If you've got a web-based store," says Lee Amon of Kate's Caring Gifts, "you never know when lightning is going to strike." Kate's Caring Gifts (online at katescaringgifts.com) is a small e-commerce store selling Earth- and people-friendly products. It's run by the husband and wife team of Lee and Kate Amon, along with one part-time employee. Kate handles product selection, order management and customer service. Lee takes care of marketing and runs the web site. At the beginning, in 2005, they packed orders on their washing machine. By the middle of 2006 they were averaging about ten orders a day. Then lightning struck. Twice. The first time was in August, when one of their body care products—a solid lotion—was mentioned in a Washington Post article on the banning of liquids on airplane flights. Orders spiked to thirty a day. The surge almost broke the Amon's order management "system." That system consisted of Kate writing the order numbers and important details down on a sheet of paper and crossing them off when the orders shipped. Preparing orders for shipment was time-consuming and error-prone. Kate packed each order using the order confirmation email from their shopping cart, Miva Merchant, as her invoice. When she had a batch of orders ready and weighed, Kate called up each individual email on her computer and then painstakingly copied and pasted each shipping address field into the US Postal Service's Click-N-Ship® program. Once the order went out, Lee or Kate had to log into the shopping cart to capture the payment for each order they'd fulfilled. Some of their orders come from Shop.com, and these required several extra steps, including manually authorizing the credit cards. The setup was so complicated that they couldn't train their part-time employee to prepare labels or capture payments. All she could do was the actual packing. And because pending orders were spread over several sheets in Kate's order tracking list, mistakes happened. Sometimes orders got lost. Other times orders got shipped out twice. Clearly, thirty orders a day was more than Kate's Caring Gifts could comfortably handle. But Lee Amon already had a solution in mind. He'd read about two strong order management programs in the online Miva Merchant discussion forums. These were the Stone Edge Order Manager and a product called Mail Order Manager. Word in the forums was that the Order Manager was not only more affordable, but it worked better with Miva Merchant, and the support from the staff at Stone Edge was excellent. Based on this feedback, Lee had decided as early as March of 2006 that when they needed an order management system, he would buy the Stone Edge Order Manager. He'd hoped to delay the purchase until 2007. But the combination of the surge in orders from the newspaper story and Kate's insistence that she wasn't going to endure another Christmas season without a better system tipped the balance. Lee bought the Order Manager in September and installed it himself. It took four days ("four long days," he reports) from the moment he submitted his credit card until they downloaded the first batch of orders. Along the way they had a few hitches setting up the integration with Endicia's DAZzle® postage program (which also provides affordable Delivery Confirmation and insurance services), but got through the tricky spots with help from the support team at Stone Edge. The Order Manager downloads orders from an online shopping cart and then stores everything in its own Microsoft Access database. It tracks inventory, creates mailing labels for carriers like the US Postal Service, UPS and FedEx, handles credit card transactions through its own integrated terminal, creates invoices and packing slips, and generally streamlines all the work of packing and shipping orders. For the Amon’s, this means that Kate no longer has to waste time writing out her order tracking sheet. She doesn't have to copy and paste address information into Click-N-Ship®. She doesn't have to capture the credit card funds order by order. Instead, it's all automatic. The Order Manager sends the address information to Endicia, prints the label, and inserts the tracking number back into the order record. It's easy to see which orders have shipped, and easy to capture the funds in just a few clicks. Kate figures she saves at least an hour of tedious work for every ten orders. Because the system, in her words, "worked intuitively from the get-go," it's easy to teach people how to use it. She's been able to give her part-time employee more responsibility for shipping orders and capturing payments. The Order Manager also eases the communication difficulties that had plagued their earlier "system." Because all the orders are kept in one central database, it's obvious which ones have been sent. There's no chance of shipping duplicate orders. What's the value of the extra time the Order Manager freed up? Well, without it Kate wouldn't have tracked down the product that was responsible for their second strike of lightning. Early in 2006 Kate had found a supplier selling make-your-own-candy kits for kids. The kits were perfect for the store: not only were they fun gifts to give, but each kit came with natural ingredients from different parts of the world, along with educational materials on different cultures. But the supplier lost her original order, and Kate didn't have time or energy to get the mixup sorted out. After the Order Manager was up and running in September, Kate finally had a chance to follow up with her supplier. She received her order and put the items on the web site. On December 15th, ABC's daytime talk show, "The View," with Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Rosie O'Donnell, ran a segment featuring the make-your-own-candy kits. By the 18th of December, Kate's Caring Gifts had received over 600 orders for the kit. All of them needed to be delivered in time for the holidays. Without the Order Manager, the shop would never have been able to keep up. Lee Amon estimates they would have had to cancel at least half of the orders, sacrificing not only the revenue from the sale but also the potential lifetime value of those customers. But Lee and Kate were able to get every single order mailed out by the 20th of December. Sure, they didn't get much sleep, and they hardly saw each other except in passing as one went on duty at the store and the other took over with their two kids, but they "got their orders out and looked professional doing it." And there are more benefits yet to come. Kate's Caring Gifts is using only the core features of the Order Manager. They haven't yet set up the inventory tracking features that will enable the Order Manager to communicate inventory levels with the Miva Merchant shopping cart in real time, thus making sure that customers don't order items that are out of stock. They'll also use the vendor and reorder level tracking features to streamline their wholesale ordering process. Lee looks forward to better business intelligence data now that all orders from Miva Merchant and from their Shop.com storefront will be captured in the same database, giving him better information about sales trends. The Amon’s are clear about the value of the Stone Edge Order Manager. "Without a doubt, it's the best investment we have made," says Lee. Would they have wanted to start using it earlier? Yes, but not at the very beginning. They see their old order management system as an important step in learning how to run their own business and get it off the ground. However, once they were ready to lay a strong foundation for growth, the Order Manager became essential. And it more than paid for itself during the Amon's four-day deluge of orders in December. The Amon’s have this advice for other store owners: don't wait until the situation gets intolerable to implement a good order management system. "If you're serious about your business," says Lee, "you have to be ready when lightning strikes." Current System Application Features and Functions:
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