The Orien Group is a privately-owned medical supplies company, with its distribution and head office located in Melbourne, Victoria. First founded in 2008, Orien has rapidly expanded from a seller of latex gloves to a full-fledged health and dental consumables wholesale distributor. Once a purely bricks-and-mortar store, the company now operates nationally with a growing warehouse and sophisticated eCommerce facilities.
Why did The Orien Group choose JCurve ERP?
The Orien Group started out supplying latex medical examination gloves to dental customers. As the business expanded to include more product lines and multiple overseas suppliers, the complexityof the business also increased. The existing software couldn’t handle requirements such as foreign currency and landed costs including taxes, duties and wharfage.
“We found that the simple QuickBooks package we started off with was okay for a small business, but once we started carrying and controlling a wider inventory, its functionality was just too limited,” explains Erdem Salih, MD and founder, The Orien Group.
It was time to take the gloves off and find a winning technology solution. Recognising that the company was fast outgrowing its basic software, Erdem researched the best business management software options available. Erdem saw that JCurve ERP, an exclusive small business edition of the #1 global cloud ERP system, NetSuite, fitted the bill perfectly. More importantly, JCurve ERP could scale with Orien’s future growth plans.
Instant benefits: “information is power”
The setup and implementation process was a success, with experienced consultants from NetSuite’s #1 partner worldwide, JCurve Solutions (ASX: JCS), assisting each step of the way. Erdem and his team were keen to learn how JCurve ERP could drive business improvements and this motivated them to learn the ERP system quickly. Migration was scheduled over the new year period while the business was quiet. This tactic meant that when operations restarted, staff could process orders immediately, with clean data.
The Orien Group saw immediate benefits from JCurve ERP: “Information is power,” as Erdem describes it. Before the changeover, the team at Orien were reliant on seemingly endless spreadsheets which took hours to create, maintain, and analyse. Working with static data also meant relying on potentially outdated reports. JCurve ERP’s sophisticated reporting is now delivering crucial information and analysis, as it happens, at the touch of a button.
“With JCurve ERP compared to our previous software, it’s just a different level. You can instantly get the information you need to make good business decisions: who are your top customers? What are they ordering? What are your real margins? JCurve ERP gives a real handle on your costs,” Erdem says.
“Looking back on it now I ask myself, ‘Why did it take me so long? Why did I wait that long to switch to JCurve ERP?’ We really were held back by the previous system we were using.”
More powerful inventory management is now supporting Orien with managing over 4,500 SKUs. “To be able to handle that, you can’t do it on the back of an envelope,” Erdem points out. The ERP software takes care of inventory costs, landed costs, and stock levels, which are all updated in real-time. Orien can control expiry dates and lot numbers – critical for their industry – much more efficiently. JCurve ERP shows products that are coming up to their expiry dates, letting the Orien team take decisive action on discounting and selling products well before they would be otherwise written-off.
Increased mobility has been another significant advantage. The Orien Group salespeople can log in to JCurve ERP and stay productive when out on the road. Before meetings, they can view a customer’s file and see which products a customer purchases regularly, along with the full sales history and correspondence. This data empowers Orien’s salesforce to up-sell, cross-sell and stay up-to-date with all customer interactions.
Going forward, The Orien Group plans to further increase efficiency throughout the warehouse by using RF scanning of barcodes that will speed up the pick-pack-ship process, reduce picking errors, and increase stock turn and accuracy. Orien is also connecting its website with JCurve ERP to create a powerful, integrated eCommerce platform that will reduce manual order entry and double-handling of data.
As Orien continues its impressive growth and reaches the 20-user limit of JCurve ERP, JCurve Solutions can assist with taking the business to the next level. The seamless transition from JCurve ERP to an enterprise-level NetSuite edition is a further expansion step that Erdem is already anticipating.
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