1) Introducing Bijal Patel (00:13- 02:43)
Timothy Diep: Good morning, everybody, or good evening, depending on where you guys are at.
Welcome to the DCKAP esessions for 2021. This is our February edition. And we’ll be talking about how we went live with Cathy’s concepts. So looking forward to this event, we have an awesome lineup of just all the partners that were involved with the process of Cathy’s concept website.
So Cathy’s concept is a premier customizable gifts provider that sells items ranging from travel, home wedding, and other related product lines. Information related to new orders, product details, real-time inventory, and customer information work to be manually transferred from one application to another. This is one of their biggest pain points with the site. orders placed in big commerce had to be manually entered into distribution one, and the latest information inventory and product details from distribution one had to be updated manually into Big commerce.
Cathy’s concepts required the automation of data entry related to orders, products, inventory and other key business data from into their ERP and e-commerce software. So today, we’ll be going over the case study with some of the partners who were involved with this project. Before that, I’d like to have a big shout-out to all the sponsors for distribution, one from big commerce and from DCKAP Cloras.
These are the guys that will be speaking today. So and you know what DCKAP, we are really a big community and we love to bring the ecosystem together. So all these different companies, they have lots of skills, and they’re very good at what they do. So if there’s anything that we could do to help to even connect you guys, to the right technology partner, do let us know You can reach me at Timothy D at DCKAP.com.
Bringing on our first speaker, Bijal Patel. He’ll be talking about how distribution one increased efficiency for Cathy’s concept. So Michelle has been working as the mobile solutions manager for over eight years now working closely with mobile apps, e-commerce, VDI, and other integration products. He’s had a hand in many new distributions, one software feature, and he focuses on the intricacies of technology and its application and improving the distribution process. Bijal’s motto is to do good and be good. And the rest will fall into place. So right now I like to bring up Bijal and he’ll have a presentation for you guys. Alright,
2) Starting on the journey (02:43: 03:38)
Bijal Patel: Perfect. Thanks for that intro. I’m going to share my screen shortly. Alright guys, so I appreciate DCKAP for setting this up. I look forward to going through this journey for Cathy’s concept. Before we get into that, I just want to take a brief moment to quickly talk about distribution one, who we are what we do, just quickly set the agenda I’m going to quickly give you a brief of distribution one overall, some of the technologies that we offer, followed by some of the tools and technology that we use to make Cathy’s concept process a little bit more efficient, and how we kind of went through that whole journey. Like I said, if you have any questions you can pop by shooting them over in the chat, we will be addressing those towards the end of the meeting here shortly.
3) Innovations and moving ahead with changes (03:38:- 07:07)
So distribution one is celebrating it’s 25th year anniversary this year. So we were founded in 1996 by our current owner and CFOs just Larry Ward industry. Dean Christiansen with a simple mission statement in mind where we’re just wanting to provide a feature-rich, software to wholesale distribution, to eliminate a lot of their pain points with some of the manual intensive work, kind of automate them and make it more seamless and cost-effective for them overall.
We have offices across the US specifically in New Jersey Mount Laurel, we have a couple overseas offices so we do work with international businesses as well there. As far as the company goes, we mostly deal with wholesale distributors across multiple different verticals specifically towards fastener industry supplies and retails. Our customers are kind of smaller, ranging from very small five to 10 user systems all up to 200 to 300 user systems. So we have a wide variety of clients across the US, Canada, Mexico, UK.
So there’s a lot of different experiences that go along with that. We can kind of help you along with those. Overall at this point, I just want to talk about some of the basic functionality just introduce you kind of to some of the ERP aspects of our software itself that we sell is called GRP. It’s got a comprehensive list of technology available API, mobile apps, e-commerce to name a few. Going through those, as you can see on the list right there, we have, really, it’s a one-stop-shop for a lot of different requirements.
For a lot of our customers who have kind of migrated, they have kind of outgrown their older system and tend to stay with us to use a lot of different so we’re not modularized in any way, we have a lot of software that can you can help you kind of grow as your company grows, starting with the order entry processes. This applies to your warehouse automation to invoicing to CRM, as you can just see something to name a few right there.
So we should be able to accommodate a lot of our customers as they go through the growth cycle. And they end up having additional options. So that’s something that kind of stands out as where there’s no modularization, we help you grow with the software as well. Specifically, in addition to that, as the technology is changing, we have a lot of different supplemental products that you will need to adapt to the changing environment, such as mobile app suite, e-commerce platform, some credit integration with higher lower fees, API capabilities, and document imaging and such as to name a few.
And with that, I’m going to kind of jump over into how we use that technology to help Cathy’s concept kind of change their business. So give you a quick history of Cathy’s concept here. Strictly, they used to strictly deal with a lot of b2b customers, big box stores selling a lot of engraving products, and things like that. So they used to deal with a lot of big box stores. But as you can tell, with the technology changing with Bob, purchasing, power changing, a lot of people going direct to retail, they had to do a shift in their business model. So it all started when they’ve been with us since 2007. So you can imagine the technology at that point versus where we are today. They were doing really well across the board. They’re good customers of ours. They’ve been with us since 2007.
4) Getting Distribution one on Board (07:07-11:50)
Cathay’s Concepts used to deal with a lot of big box stores. Like I said before, a lot of high-end AI-intensive processes, boxes, just sending pallets and pallets and stuff over to a lot of big box stores. With the process of the buying power, power changing for a lot of customers who are going retail directly, their profit margins shift started going down there. So it started with simply just an email from dawn to General Manager at the time. This is the kind of relationship we have with our customers. She just reached out to me that she couldn’t make the conference. And they’re going about a journey of trying to get into the retail space trying to avoid the middleman for say, that point. So it all started with a generic “Hey, let’s talk about it”.
How can you guys help us with what options we have? At that point, we went through this whole journey, where we just did one on one sessions with them and looked at their need, what they were trying to accomplish there. So this is outside the realm of VDI just kind of trying to understand what they need, what they’re thinking. And with our expertise. me being here, which is seven years of this one, I’ve seen a lot of customers go through very similar pain points there. So we went through the full journey of how they can go to e-commerce, whether they want to start off small, do something manual versus how they have where they want to go with it.
So we looked at a lot of technology partners, a lot of different e-commerce platforms as well, a lot of different integration partners alongside that. And we found that hey, BigCommerce fit what they need. They were trying to do something to give a really good user experience, which BigCommerce kind of supplies for them. And at that point, they didn’t want to be entering anything manually, it’s just kind of, there’s no point of having an e-commerce solution where you’re entering stuff manually in the system, manually with BigCommerce pulling the orders in typing those into the system.
That’s where a lot of the technical aspects came into play, we have an API offering that’s really robust and gives you a lot of open-source open access to the database. So you can essentially push and pull a lot of the data directly from the GRP. So that ends up being your record of source. So that way, you just enter stuff as you’re adding items against the GRP system and that can easily pull to the commerce. Along with that we had a lot of different tools and technology that we had to offer at that point.
Okay, this is what we have to offer. This is what BigCommerce had to offer. Somewhere there had to be a middle handshake that needed to happen. That’s where DCKAP filled in that void for us. We reviewed quite a few different partners with them and DCKAP by far, kind of with the technology and the ease of use, they had two offers stuck out for everybody.
And we kind of went on this journey of “Hey, let’s start with just getting the orders into the system pulling the customer record”. A lot of different kinds of things that go onto the day-to-day aspect of it. Initially, it was very simple, just a very simple push of an item pushing the orders into the system, then it kind of evolved into a lot of days doing a lot of engraving products, a lot of different types of custom stuff that they do.
How do we integrate that? So it’s been a really fruitful kind of partnership as far as going through technology and the workflow. So we’ve helped them DCKAP has been a great partner along with BigCommerce in this journey us, as the requirements come up, we usually set up sessions, we go through it, and we kind of give him the options and what can or cannot be done. So at that point, we kind of went through the whole life cycle, and, at this point, the whole process is pretty much integrated. They have inventory information getting pulled from the MRP orders being synced to the MRP, without any manual intervention to this date on there.
After we implemented this, this is just kind of some of the testimonials from Cathy’s concept team. Overall, as part of using the ERP system. Since its inception, they have kind of moved away from a lot of paper-based processes that were costing them a decent amount of money, but to all the customization stuff that they do with their products that they sell. So they kind of reduce cost across the board, along with the efficiency of not having to worry about having to manually enter stuff, everything’s kind of seamless. So they can sit back and just once they have the products and let the software do the software itself on there. And overall the process, as you can see here, took a few months to kind of get going. But we’re at 2021 at this point, and we haven’t seen any major hiccups or any complaints. So everyone’s been happy. And we have pushed over a lot more leads and progress from that support concept for us.
5) The wrap up- (11:50:13:55)
Tim Diep: Thankyou, Bijal! We’ll reconnect with you again after this with the discussion panel. So thank you so much for that. So again, I would just like to thank all the sponsors for all the speakers as well. So that from distribution, one from BigCommerce and for Cloras, that was a great informative session, just by looking at the poll. Section two, it seems like a lot of you guys were looking for so for some help in integration, that was the number one aspect for maybe some of your pain points. But then also managing data, and even gathering requirements and better design. So if you guys do need any help with that do reach out. We will be having a post-event networking session after this. Let me click on that real quick. So I’ll share that you guys could join that immediately after this session. So yeah, so what we’ll have our sales team, we’ll have other people in the ecosystem join that room as well. So there’ll be a great way to network if you guys are still available.
And just upcoming. We’ll have our next session on March 9, and look forward to having the next session on March 9. If you guys don’t have any questions, we’ll see you guys then.