Innoliving uses Zoho Flow to standardize their data and save over 1,500 working hours
- INDUSTRYRetail/ Wholesale
- TYPEB2B,B2C
About the company
Innoliving is an Italian company offering electronic health and fitness devices, beauty tools, personal care products, compact home appliances, outdoor products, and advanced baby care items for both home and professional use. Their 18-person team serves major retail chains, wholesalers, and sells directly to the European market.
Standardizing customer information
Innoliving's customers are from many different countries in Europe, and each country has a specific format for shipping addresses. For example, in Italy, an address would contain a province name, but an address in Germany may not. A worker might know this difference and proceed accordingly, but a software system may not be able to identify this difference. Another example of difference is the pin-code; a few countries in Europe have a five digit pin-code and the rest have a six digit pin-code. It is a challenge to ensure that a company's software can identity all the variations and ensure that each address is correct.
Ferdinando Ploschberger is the head of ecommerce and online operations at Innoliving. His team was experiencing these types of variations for almost every order, and they had no other option but to check each detail manually and make the required corrections. They would check the orders they have received in Zoho Inventory through their website, correct the shipping addresses, and then add them to their ERP software manually. It would take them almost six hours to verify around 200 orders. Ploschberger realized that they needed to reform the existing process in order to scale up their operations.
"Order management and creating business reports involves a lot of manual work and consumes a lot of our time. We wanted a solution that would help us streamline our processes and automate the process of syncing data across our app eco system and eliminate manual work."
— Ferdinando Ploschberger, Head of Ecommerce & Online Operations, Innoliving
They found their solution in Zoho Flow. Ploschberger started by integrating Zoho Inventory with their ERP software, Essenzia, with the help of Zoho Flow's Custom Functions. The flow they built not only connects these applications, but also checks, corrects, and ensures the order's data, especially the address, is right and all the required information, such as the door number, street, province, county, and pin-code, is available and correct. Now when they receive an order in Zoho Inventory, Zoho Flow checks if the information shared is as the requirements. With the help of Flow's Custom Functions, they correct the necessary details and then sync them with their ERP software.
After automating the process of standardizing customer data, Innoliving wanted to explore how they can build on this flow and also check if they can automate the process of adding a customer to their email newsletter campaign. They extended the flow to check if the customer has given them permission to send their newsletters and then automatically add them to their email campaign list. This flow streamlines and automates the process of standardizing their customer details as well as their customer experience.
Standardizing order information
Innoliving list its products on over fifty different physical retail stores and selling platform. Each platform shares details of an order with them in their own format. Adding to this each stock keeping unit (SKU) has its own dimensions which allows them to calculate it's volume for shipping. They minimize the number of packages by adding up the volume of each item in an order to calculate the total volume. They had to do all this manually, which resulted in taking at least three business days to ship each order from their warehouse. This problem would only get worse when managing multi-pallet shipping.
By using Zoho Flow, they integrated Zoho Inventory with most of their clients' platforms using Zoho Flow's Webhook Triggers. They created a flow for each distribution channel, and now when they receive an order from any one of them, it creates and order in Zoho Inventory. With the help of Custom Functions, they calculate the volume of each SKU in the order and sum it up to get the total volume of the order. This is then recorded in Zoho Inventory and Essenzia, their ERP software. They extended the flow by automating the process of assigning the closest warehouse for the order based on the shipping address and its pin-code along with auto-assigning a logistics partner.
Automating the logistics process
Innoliving uses the services of multiple logistics companies for shipping orders. This helps ensure they deliver orders to customers on time and safely, but it also presents operational challenges for the company. The primary challenge they face is to manually ensure each order's data matches to the logistics partner's data requirements and then feed the data into their file transfer protocol (FTP) software. Manually work on this is challenging specially when the number of orders is high or are from multiple countries.
They automated this process using Zoho Flow. Now, Zoho Flow verifies the order details when a package is created in Zoho Inventory. Using Custom Functions, the details of the order are converted to the format required by the assigned logistics partner. The converted data is then stored in Google Sheets and updated back to the order in Zoho Inventory. Using Custom Functions, the data is then uploaded to the logistics partner's FTP software, where they can use the data for their shipping process.
Benefits and ROI
"Zoho Flow has helped us save over 1,500 hours per year and increased our revenue by over half a million euros per year across all selling channels. Its versatility and limitless capabilities ensured we can run complex workflows and automate our business without the need to hire a developer. Their custom functions are a game changer for us and it ensures all our data is in sync across all the systems."
— Ferdinando Ploschberger, Head of Ecommerce & Online Operations, Innoliving
Innoliving's processes require their data to sync with multiple selling platforms, delivery booking services, and logistic partners applications. For order management, they use Zoho Inventory, Essenzia, Google sheets, and a few other API connectors. They needed a system that would allow them to build complex and limitless workflows to automate their processes. They found that in Zoho Flow.
With the help of Zoho Flow, they eliminated much of their manual work, such as verifying addresses, calculating the volume of packages, and entering data across different apps. This ensured they can increase their order intake from 100 orders per day to over 2,000 orders per day during peak season.
They are also now able to offer same-day shipping to their B2B and B2C customers. They previously needed at least two business days to ship an order. Before Zoho Flow, they were unable to accept orders during holidays, but now they can take standard orders anytime. With data getting converted, managed, and synced in real time, Zoho Flow has helped them increase their annual revenue by over half a million euros.
Moving Forward
Innoliving is constantly evaluating its business processes and identifying key areas that can benefit from automation. They are also exploring opportunities to streamline their existing processes, automate them to become more efficient, and offer an improved customer experience.