Background
Unify Brand Partnerships (UBP) is a UK based distributor of sport, outdoor and lifestyle brands throughout the UK.
Management formulated a high growth strategy which included the addition of an online B2B system capability to market and sell our products.
The B2B needed to:
- easily provide product and marketing information to Customers
- support the pre-book and refill sales process
- enable Customers to place pre orders easily and review real time stock availability to purchase in season stock
- support Internal Teams in processing the increased volume of orders more efficiently
The UBP business needed to introduce automations that would protect against the expected parallel costs in taking on additional resources to support the growth.
Taking on new brands to drive growth is a big commitment, outlined Dominic Flanagan, Head of Finance at UBP. “Our systems need to be able to deal with the associated challenges to deliver the desired growth. Automation and delivery of efficiencies was required to support the management of increased Customer Service workload, the generation of catalogues, samples and showrooms that really ate into the profit of each new acquisition.
We’d never engaged with B2B before but were impressed with Brandscope’s functionality, intimate knowledge of the nuances around the wholesale process and overall capacity to deliver cost saving automations and more streamlined procedures.”
The other challenge was collating, analysing and formulating bulk purchase orders to support manufacturing and pre-book demands within a very tight window, a situation expected to worsen as the brand volumes grew.
“Due to the high volume of pre-booking, we needed to get the final bulk orders completed within deadlines,” recalled Dominic. “If we could secure and process orders faster we would have more time to review the buy, resulting in greater ordering accuracy, with better and faster decision making on additional inventory purchases.”
Solution
UBP considered a number of B2B options and identified Brandscope as the right solution to support the targeted growth.
UBP engaged with Brandscope and spent ten weeks integrating their Orderwise ERP to automate order, inventory and product information data flows between the two systems, while loading the seasonal pre-book releases for their first four brands. Due to the complicated nature of the territory set-ups, pricing and segmentation modules were also introduced to ensure correct views for Retailer partners at product level.
“The onboarding process was very fluid and we found the Brandscope team to be highly efficient and supportive in the overall process, from a technical and non-technical point of view”, said Dominic. “They spent a lot of time with our internal team workshopping our processes and market interaction to ensure that pricing, market segmentation, territory structures and information feeds were all optimised by implementing the right modules. Management, Marketing, Sales, IT and Customer Service departments were all involved in this process. Integration, support and ongoing service is great.”
Outcome
The impact on pre-book timelines was dramatic, with orders being received into the Orderwise ERP 200% faster than prior seasons awarding UBC with more time to review and then formulate bulk orders.
“Pre-books came in faster, but we could also report on the orders that were still in motion (buy plans) giving us visibility on popular Retailer styles. By having this information, we were able to order additional stock against trending styles which fuelled in-season refill and gave us greater control over stock obsolescence. This is extremely key in helping to manage inventory exposure and capital risk.”
The administration weight on internal resources also diminished (despite new brands coming online) due to orders being received directly into the ERP from the retailer or sales representatives, and Retailers having greater access to information like marketing assets, barcodes, product specifications to self-manage.
“By engaging the Retailers in the system,” said Dominic, “it’s allowed us to do more with less but also refocus internal energies into areas that really help our partners as opposed to double processing data.”
“Brandscope’s functionality is closely aligned with the nuances of wholesaling and it’s very apparent that the system has been well thought out with respect to real life application,” says Dominic. “This was particularly relevant with pricing, but also in defining territories, product segmentation and custom filtering to ensure that our Retailer buyers were always seeing information that was specifically relevant to their own business. This really instilled confidence in the tool which will continue to equate to greater engagement.”
Overall we are very pleased with the decision to engage Brandscope as our B2B Solution.
Testimonial
“The Brandscope software platform is backed by business processes, as much as it is technology, focussed on streamlining traditional wholesale methods and delivering both profitability and scalability. If your strategy is to grow fast on limited resources and capital, then it’s built for you.”
