Industry

ILCA / Laser Dinghy Manufacturing

Company size

15-20 staff

Challenge

Performance Sailcraft Australia (PSA) is the only builder of the Olympic class ILCA (formerly Laser) dinghy in Australia and one of only six only around the globe.  

PSA management came to the RSM Digital Advisory team after separately implementing inventory management and e-commerce platforms.

While both systems operated properly, PSA had two business critical challenges:

• The e-commerce platform didn’t sync sales data to the inventory management system and all sales and customer details were manually transferred between systems. This significantly impacted the accuracy of data and stock levels were not accurate in real time.
•  Shipping on the e-commerce platform was linked to one carrier and calculating on weight only. As PSA’s key products are large and bulky items which require specialty shipping, the automatically calculated shipping costs were often significantly undercharging the freight component and PSA was regularly losing money on fulfilment.

Solution

The RSM Digital team worked in consultation with PSA management on weekly sprints to resolve both the e-commerce and inventory management syncing and shipping issues.

We were able to utilize our deep product knowledge and refine the setup of each solution so that when the final integration was turned on, the products matched and syncing worked seamlessly. This involved a considerable level of product clean up along the way, which further simplified the operations of the business.

Several solutions were discussed to resolve the shipping challenge. We considered using individual product size and weight in the calculation of individual shipping rates across multiple carriers.

We also considered the potential improvements to fulfilment, due to the unique nature of shipping dinghies and the different sized spars and other items.

Ultimately, a scaled ‘flat rate’ shipping fee system was selected, together with a fulfilment solution to fully automate the printing of shipping orders and notification to shipping carriers.

Outcome

In sorting out these two critical issues, PSA has been able to save over four (4) hours per week in manual data entry and significantly improve data accuracy and timeliness of information in their inventory management and financial systems.

Further, by calculating shipping on a scaled flat rate they significantly reduced undercharging and improved margin across the business.  Ultimately, the process and system improvements allowed the PSA management team to focus less on internal process issues and more on growth through product development and effective marketing.

Lessons learned

Automating the back-office tasks for a traditional retail business which has moved online can be very difficult when systems for accounting, inventory management, e-commerce and shipping are handled separately.

We highly recommend clients approach our team when in the planning stages, rather than undertaking post implementation integration of systems which may have been set up by different providers on different platforms.

In this case, through our deep technical knowledge, the RSM digital team were able to facilitate a combination of business process improvements together with intelligent use of technology to integrate existing systems and to ensure the best possible business outcome for PSA.

For more information

If you would like further information or want to learn more about how the RSM Digital Advisory team can help you and your business, please reach out to Laurel Grey.