Inventory and sales management for a vehicle exporter

The problem

The company exports vehicles, and used Excel to manage inventory and create invoices.

• Sheets corrupted because of shared access and locking contention, and mistakes were made entering and updating formulae.
• Invalid data was entered: incorrect vehicle sizes, makes, models and so on.
• Performance dropped as the sheets grew large and complex.
• Reporting was poor, and searching and cross-referencing were difficult.
• Sales had to be entered into the accounting system by hand.
• It was difficult to tell which customers had paid and which had not.

What we did

We built a custom inventory and sales system.

• 50 simultaneous admin users, with no performance issues and no data corruption, saving time and preventing losses.
• Automated, redundant backups.
• Automatic lookup of vehicle information, for faster and more accurate data entry.
• Complex data validation rules, such as pricing based on customer tier and quantities, also for faster and more accurate data entry.
• Integration with the accounting system, which saved many hours and prevented many errors.
• Dynamic report generation: sales by vehicle type, region, customer, salesperson, time period and more. This gave management a clear view of what the business was doing and what needed improvement.
• Criteria-based searches with cross-linked result sets. For example, sales from 10 to 24 September to customers from Zambia or Zimbabwe who purchased a Toyota, and from each sale a link to the customer page or the vehicle page.
• Purchases automatically limited by the customer’s credit rating and payment status.

What changed

The purchase limits alone saved the company millions in lost collections. Data entry became faster and more accurate, the accounting work went away, and management got a clear view of the business.