Case Study: Inventory Intelligence
CLIENT OVERVIEW
Counterpoint Musical Services is a Canadian company dedicated to serving music retailers with fast, efficient and friendly personal service. They have built their business on the premise that nothing is more important than getting orders to their customers quickly:
“We strive to ship all orders placed by noon on the same day. Think of us as your warehouse: we have no minimum orders you can order as little and as often as you need.” – Counterpoint Musical Services website
THE PROBLEM
Given their need for fast shipping, having sufficient inventory is crucial to Counterpoint’s operations. The question is always “How much product do we need to order today?” They’ve been using QuickBooks for over a decade and QuickBooks keeps very accurate inventory, but there is no way to see an item’s inventory levels alongside its sales history information. Without this supporting data, determining optimal ordering quantities is nearly impossible.
Here is an inventory report in QuickBooks:
Kathleen Stokholm, manager and buyer for Counterpoint, had to order blindly for a decade! The company even attempted to implement Fishbowl Inventory hoping to get the data they needed – but after a year of struggling and $10,000 in lost capital, the attempt was abandoned.
THE SOLUTION
To provide their customers with the level of service that is central to their brand, Kathleen needs to know how much inventory to have on hand. The best way to determine this is to use historical trends – and this is where Clearify’s QQube really shines. QQube combines all transactions that affect inventory into a single subject area – making it possible to view sales AND inventory data together!
CUSTOM INVENTORY REPORTS = INTELLIGENT PURCHASING
QQube even takes the sales orders for an assembly and calculates the number of individual parts needed to fulfill the assemblies on sales orders. This feature is what makes intelligent purchasing possible. And because many of Counterpoint’s products are sold both individually and as part of more than one assembly, we were able to display assembly sales history adjacent to the parts’ history.
With a spreadsheet mock-up of Kathleen’s ideal report, Datisfy experts got to work. We built the report of her dreamsusing QQube for QuickBooks as the data source and Crystal Reports to design the layout. We were even able to add Assemblies that use the specific parts – to look at their sales and inventory levels too. As an added bonus, Counterpoint can access the report with Logicity – a free Crystal Reports viewer – so they do not have to purchase SAP Crystal Reports.
TESTIMONIAL
Wish I’d found Datisfy sooner! Datisfy has saved me hours of work and frustration. Thank you! – Kathleen’s Facebook comment
Datisfy created the report I’ve been wanting for years! This report saves me countless hours combining reports, cutting and pasting data together in Excel. I only wish I’d know this was possible sooner. Thanks.
Kathleen Stockholm
Manager and Buyer, Counterpoint Musical Services