Using Acceptum's™ flexible approach to integrate with outside applications.
SAWinesOnLine.co.uk has implemented Acceptum™ as a backoffice system to its e-commerce web site in order to control sales orders, stock levels and to produce financial data.
SAWinesOnLine.co.uk is part of the Orbit Management Services Ltd. group of companies; its business is to import
South African wines into the UK and sell them via its e-commerce web site. Other parts of the group provide a commercial and financial framework for companies starting up operations within Europe. This latter area requiring a system that can handle numerous companies, each with a small volume of transactions, but at little or no extra cost and with no impact or crossover with the former trading part of the business.
The legacy system provided financial ledgers but did not include Sales Order Processing, or Stock Control to maintain product volumes. Such modules were available, but at a high cost. The lack of using such modules was creating problems, as only the total value of Sales and Receivables was entered into the ledgers based on information from web reports. The value/volume of stock was reconciled externally to the system, again using reports from the e-commerce web site.
Instead of extending their legacy system, SAWinesOnLine decided to completely replace their legacy system with Acceptum™, taking the Base, Sales Orders and Multiply Database modules, for a price lower than that needed to extend the legacy system.
The business process put in place for Acceptum™, is to have the e-commerce web site download its sales orders; for a given period of time; into a CSV file (Excel spreadsheet or XML format is also acceptable) placed on the companies server. From here Acceptum™ reads the CSV file to create Sales Orders in Acceptum™, before changing the CSV file to show that it has been imported. The Sales Orders are then processed in the normal manner within Acceptum™ to record the delivery of each vintage despatched to the customer and to produce ledger entries to reflect the sales in the accounting ledgers.
Customer payment is handled as before, with credit card details being taken by the web site and monthly payment journals being processed for the total receipt from the credit card companies.
The Stock Control function has been configured so that for each particular wine, the total volume is broken down into vintage years, so providing greatly improved management visibility of stock levels for each wine across the vintages as the deliveries and invoices are posted.
The Sales Order processing modules is also used to process and invoice trade sales, previously been handled manually.
The Multiply Database module is used to ensure that the numerous and small management service companies are held in a separate database and do not impact in anyway; or are impacted by; the data held for the wine trading company.
Overall, Acceptum™ has greatly improved management information for Orbit Management, whilst at the same time reducing manual effort. The system can expand as the company grows its customer base and web presence.