A leading distributor of Parks and recreational equipment and Sports products located in Florida, USA had two Ecommerce websites and was using five separate software packages to manage various aspects of his business. The client represented hundreds of reputed manufacturers of Parks and Sports products through out USA and sold them through internet and government contracts. The client did not have a warehouse and managed to deliver all orders through drop ship arrangements with various delivery carriers. The client had hundreds of suppliers, number of shipping companies, thousands of retail as well as contract customers and various catalogs and categories that represented over 10000 products. There was lack of harmony between various business functions that resulted in low productivity and poor customer service. Important business information was not accessible to the client on real time basis for decision making. The client realized the urgent need to have an integrated solution for his business and he was willing to invest in software that was affordable, could be quickly implemented and that ensured guaranteed ROI.

Together with the client we searched various solutions available in the market and evaluated their suitability to the client’s business and specific needs. We zeroed out Everest ® an award winning all in one business management software.

Proffering wide capabilities, its full, real-time integration makes Everest the ideal solution for cost-conscious small and medium retail, wholesale, distribution, e-commerce, mail order and service businesses. Everest integrates all departments including accounting, purchasing, inventory, marketing, sales, RMAs, service, point of sale, contact management, CRM/groupware, management, shipping & receiving...all the way up to powerful e-commerce, for synergies that transform a small business.

For Implementation we first installed and configured different modules of Everest Advanced Edition 2.0 such as Company set up and policies, Accounting, Customers, Vendors, Shippers, Inventory, and Ecommerce. Entire data had to be cleaned, verified and migrated /imported from existing systems. Inventory items had to be reclassified, renumbered, recategorized and restructured.

Our next step was to customize Everest ® per client’s specific requirements. We developed an integrated Freight Calculation System that generated real-time freight data from about twenty shipping companies based on weight, ship class and to and from zip codes for a given order /quote. Freight calculation system has the ability to generate a “Bill of Lading” that can be printed by the client along with the purchase orders to complete a drop ship order. We built a Vendors Extranet that allowed vendors to access the system via Internet to acknowledge purchase orders (for drop shipment) and enter estimated ship dates, enter actual ship dates when orders are shipped, freight tracking information and insurance certificates for the shipment. We developed a method in Vendor Extranet for tracking price changes from vendors into a monthly report and tracking updates. We also developed customized Intranet functions for access of Vendor resource file. We created Inventory Item Special functions to flag items as “GSA-Main” of GSA-Trash”. GSA items on special contract with the federal government and require us to track the sales of these items to Federal Government customers. We built a special Matrix Items Import Wizard – with import of attributes and their values, Related Items Import Wizard and Item Update Wizard. We also developed custom reports. Under special web functions we created features that enabled the customers to create quotes and orders, track orders on real time basis. The Public Documents section helped the customers to access for documents such as credit applications online. As additional Website features we built special features to protect all images from download and ability to track source of all web traffic from various search engines.

Everest® along with our customized development provided all the right ingredients to harmonize the clients operations. It helped the client to access timely, actionable intelligence to be more responsive to customers. The solution resulted in improved financials and resource-utilization, lowered reaction-time to markets, reduced risks, and better profitability. The client was able to achieve record productivity levels, boosts data management and reduces delivery cycles. The client could have increased revenues and profits by simplifying the business processes by reducing redundancy and sell more products via rich ecommerce selling features
The business competitiveness was enhanced through better forecasts using analytical tools and wizards and increase customer satisfaction by reducing response time on fulfillment and services.