Creating Efficiency in an ECommerce Startup

Before we get into everything about our Ecommerce efficiency, first let me tell you a little about myself. I started with ISlide back in 2013 as an intern. I worked here for six months before going back to finish up school. After graduating school in 2016, I returned to work at the Norwood office. I’ve seen our process and organization change hundreds of times, and I think we finally found the right order. Our setup and system of processing is as efficient as ever and ready to take us into the future with success.

Our general operations flow runs with ease. It begins with printing out the order form, which goes to the art/design team to touch up the designs, then through our specialized printing process. Finally, the slides are taken and packed up by our trusty warehouse crew.

Every movement and process within that chain has been planned out, reviewed, and tested to make sure we aren't wasting any unnecessary time.

Since moving into the new Boston office, we've set up all of our inventory in the same place for the first time ever. We changed our layout from rows to columns, to make picking our inventory even more efficient.

My team has consistently asked me what has been the greatest change, and it's without a doubt adding SAP Business One. We installed SAP Business One this past year, and it’s been an incredible way for us to capture data about ourselves that we didn’t have in the past. We try to use data as much as possible to help us make decisions. I'm a huge fan of SAP Business One because it vastly improves our ability to track what inventory we've sold.

Each product we sell is taken from the same color stock, (we only keep blank inventory in house), and deducted from the same "blank" product. Before SAP Business One, our system was unable to sync our product sales to the "blank" product so keeping track of it was very difficult.

Now we're able to use SAP Business One to analyze our sales and refine our inventory orders. This makes sure we don't stock too much of a single slide, and also helps us ensure that we have enough of all our slide colors and sizes. 

It took a few different strategies in the midst of spiking growth, put we’re finally as efficient as we have always wanted to be. That doesn’t mean we’ll stop there though. We’re always working to improve our system as we grow.

Let me know how your company has improved efficiency! 

Dylan Botelho contributed to this blog entry.