Kieran Callaghan, Sales Manager at Classic New Zealand aka Classic Sheepskins speaks about their eCommerce integration between NetSuite and Shopify.
Watch the interview here.
My name is Kieran Callaghan and I work at Classic New Zealand Limited, which is also known as Classic Sheepskins – a sheepskin tannery based in Napier, New Zealand.
My role at Classic is Sales Manager, is the official title, but being a pretty small team at the admin side of things here, it does roll that into marketing and operations. Our operations is predominantly driven by sales, so they go hand in hand and that is as a key part of my day-to-day work.
“We use Shopify selling direct to consumers online our sheepskin products, and we use the integration to bring in the data into our ERP system, which is NetSuite.“
Our main use of the Convergence integration is with our eCommerce platforms. We use Shopify selling direct to consumers online our sheepskin products, and we use the integration to bring in the data into our ERP system, which is NetSuite.That runs all things from our accounting software, our customer relationship management, our inventory and stock tracking.
The main benefits and the parts that are supported by the integration are our stock management, our invoicing, customer relationship management and our marketing data. Previous to the integration we were bringing in basics of data purely for accounting purposes, which was manually entered. So, this is not only streamlining the process for us, but ensures that we are capturing a lot more data that is available. That’s helped not only our marketing side of the business, but also our efficiencies, our production and operations.
“… in terms of the extra savings there, it would be $15,000 to $20,000 on top of the $10,000 labour unit.”
Our savings with the integration primarily comes down to labour hours. We are seasonal in our eCommerce sales particularly. So, it does change throughout the year, but we would see anywhere between half an hour and three and a half hours of one labor unit being saved a day. On that alone, we’re looking at around $10,000 a year in savings, but that’s just the base of “like for like”. We’re not getting “like for like” now, which is brilliant. We’re getting a lot more than what we’re doing before. As I said, we were just entering the pure basics when we had to do it manually. Now we’re capturing a lot more data, and that data can be used for marketing purposes and also operation and production planning. So, in terms of the extra savings there, it would be double again, if not more. Say, $15,000 to $20,000 on top of the straight labour unit.
The implementation phase for us was, quite unique because at the time we were putting in a very large ERP system changing over. So, that was completely new to us as well. The part that we really liked about working with Convergence was: 1) There were things that we will yet to learn and yet to know. And so they, used their previous experience to aid us in what we might need and might not need in some areas that we were still a bit blind on. The other part was we started with a bit of a list of what we needed and what would be nice to have and looked at a roadmap around implementation timing with what else we had going on the business. And that was really important to us to be able to get up and running straight away with exactly what we needed. And then it’s for extras down the track, which was hugely beneficial in terms of what we had going on in the business at the time. It was a massive change for us and our staff and so to be able to implement it in a manner that didn’t highly impact anyone negatively was really beneficial.
The ability to work with Convergence on the implementation was great. And then also the expertise around the platforms we were using. As I said, we use Shopify and NetSuite. Shopify we’ve been using for some years, but NetSuite was brand new. To have that knowledge across those products already was really helpful with the implementation.
With the ongoing support from Convergence, luckily we haven’t required too much, which shows a good initial setup. We did have one change that was required, which was, due to changes of how we had to report in our accounting system and wasn’t anything to do with the initial setup. It was quite a tricky one, but it was great to have the support of Convergence to work through this and how best to attack it. And then they just got on and fixed it for us and got it up and running. We did some testing and that seemed to be spot on first hit and away we went. It was a very simple process of the ongoing support. I guess the main thing is we felt like there was a touch point there at any point for us to call upon. It felt like we can, approach Convergence whenever, if there are any issues.
“I would totally recommend Convergence”
I would totally recommend Convergence. Very professional in the way they work. They’ve got a great product and a great team of getting it up and running for businesses. And I would say it’s definitely something worth considering, especially if you have a lot of manual entry or there is a chance to do something better. It’s just to get the program up and running. Once it’s going, you can really sit back and just let it all the work for you and get on with bigger things in your business.