Faverton Group speeds up order processing by 90% using Zoho Flow

About the company

Faverton Group is a Philippines-based importation, distribution, and retail company known for its diverse product range, including office and school supplies, electronics, and health products. Their flagship school and office supplies brand, Supplies.com.ph, operates 24/7, with an extensive online presence on major marketplaces.

Faverton's business started long before the ecommerce boom took off in the Philippines, and they were already a player in the office and school supplies business from 2009. They managed deliveries and shipments within the Philippines, as well as internationally, at a time when cash-on-delivery wasn't common. The company, founded by CEO Marian Lylee Pascua, stands by their commitment to high product quality and excellent customer service.

Making ecommerce and accounting work together seamlessly

As ecommerce boomed, and platforms like WooCommerce and Amazon gained traction, Faverton expanded its business' reach through online marketplaces. They began by listing their products on major online marketplaces and launched their own online store from their website using WooCommerce. Initially, they maintained a master database that included product details, prices, and inventory details in a Google Sheets spreadsheet, and used this database to populate listings on marketplaces like Amazon, Lazada, and TikTok Shop.

Back then, their order fulfillment process would start by assigning orders to employees based on their availability and their designated regions. Employees would then record order details, generate invoices manually, send those invoices to customers via email, and take care of the transactions that followed. They soon realized that this process was wasting their employees' time and skills.

In 2020, to streamline this process, they started using Zoho Books to handle accounting and inventory management. Their lead developer, Jemia Manaid, also developed a custom middleware application using Azure to process and move details of their orders from various marketplaces and their online store. They soon subscribed to Zoho One and got introduced to Zoho Flow, Zoho Cliq, Zoho Marketing Automation, and Zoho SalesIQ. Zoho Flow was implemented to automate data exchange between the various steps in their workflows.

Using Zoho Flow, they integrated Zoho Books with their tech stack. Faverton could now quickly generate invoices and bills, manage pricing and stock inventory, and obtain consolidated sales reports.

"There's a bit of learning, such as the triggers, criteria, and other elements that make a workflow, but those are the only things that you need to understand. With traditional coding, though, it's big and usually overwhelming."

Marian Lylee PascuaFounder and CEOFaverton

Maintaining a consistent master price list

With the introduction of Zoho Flow, Faverton also streamlined the process of updating their master price list. Usually, prices for their diverse range of products are influenced by factors like production and distribution costs, which can vary over time. Initially, they configured their systems in such a way that price changes first appeared in Zoho Books. However, since they used Google Sheets as their master spreadsheet to track product details, they needed a seamless way to update this information across both platforms.

Zoho Flow made this process smooth and efficient. Now, whenever a new product's information is added or an existing product's information is updated in Zoho Books, it's automatically updated in their Google Sheets master price list. This real-time synchronization helps Faverton monitor pricing changes efficiently and ensures consistency of information across their organization.

Real-time addition of new products to online stores

Faverton also developed a smart integration between Zoho Books and WooCommerce, which simplified the process of posting new products to their online stores.

With this integration, any new product added to Zoho Books is automatically published on the company's website with all the relevant details, such as product name, description, specifications, and photos. This automation has transformed what was once a tiring and mundane manual process involving multiple copy-paste tasks into a fully automated workflow.

Benefits and ROI

The introduction of Zoho Books and Zoho Flow has significantly streamlined Faverton Group's operations. Zoho Books serves as their central platform for accounting and inventory management, while Zoho Flow handles all integration and workflow automation needs.

"With Zoho Flow, the time required for order processing alone has been reduced from 10-15 minutes per order to just 1-2 minutes."

Marian Lylee PascuaFounder and CEOFaverton

This shows an average improvement of more than 90% in terms of speed for this critical aspect of their business.

Automating other time-consuming tasks—such as updating product prices and posting new or updated products on online stores—also saves the organization dozens of hours each week. As a result, employees now get more time to focus on work requiring human interaction and creativity, such as customer engagement, supply chain management, and crafting detailed order descriptions and captions.

"You can consider me a low-code person. Anyone, regardless of their knowledge in coding, can automate their business using Zoho Flow. I think that's the beauty of it."

Marian Lylee PascuaFounder and CEOFaverton

Moving forward

With extensive use of Zoho Flow, Marian now views her business from a strategic bird's-eye perspective, identifying workflows that consume resources and don't require human expertise. She now plans to automate these workflows by integrating more of their tech stack, further optimizing time and effort.

By introducing more Zoho apps to their tech stack and automating more of their workflows, the company plans to streamline their processes even further and boost their business operations going forward.