Order and inventory management solution for fashion business

Order and inventory management solution for fashion business

Itransition developed an order and inventory management system, integrated it with Shopify and Adobe Commerce (Magento), and achieved 50% product management cost reduction thanks to Odoo migration and automated stock replenishment.

Table of contents

Context

Founded in 2000, Temperley London is a fashion apparel brand for women offering casual, formal, bridal, and outwear clothing and accessories. The company has standalone stores in Somerset, Chelsea, and Dubai. They sell their products through an online platform, multiple brick-and-mortar stores, and a wholesale business working with global retailers. In addition, the customer has several logistics partners.

To automate business processes, the customer used a variety of software systems:

  • Prima omnichannel software for order management
  • WFX for order processing and procurement
  • WFX PLM for product development
  • Joor for wholesale operations
  • Adobe Commerce (Magento) for selling online 
  • Retail Pro POS for retail management

On top of that, they had a database of 15,000 products, with 3,000 of them processed daily, that had to be managed manually. Needless to say, the established workflows were neither time- nor cost-effective.

Because data from different systems was managed in parallel and synchronized manually, Temperley London was looking for a solution to automate data management from different systems in one place. To achieve this, they needed a technology partner to help them replace Prima with Odoo, and gradually switch from Adobe Commerce (Magento) to Shopify. Then, Odoo would handle apparel manufacturing and stock, order processing, connecting with logistics partners, and supporting returns.

The customer selected Itransition based on our proven track record in ERP service delivery, a solid track record of working with the fashion industry, and customer references.

Solution

At the beginning of the project, Itransition analyzed the customer’s business processes and shared our findings with the product owner, CEO of Temperley London. We also helped document, streamline, and facilitate the processes by unifying all in-store, online, and wholesale orders for handling them in one place.

Itransition started with analyzing client requirements and business needs to engineer the most suitable solution. We supported the move to Odoo Enterprise because of the high costs of Adobe Commerce (Magento) development and use. Our team developed an order and inventory management solution using Odoo that unified all the existing systems, data flows, and processes for the Temperley London team. Itransition also set up important integrations and helped the customer with data migration and cleansing. Moreover, Itransition’s business analysis held training sessions for the customer on using accounting and sales modules.

All order management processes are now handled by Odoo, which helped to streamline and automate complex operations.

Quotations

Itransition also helped the customer implement a POS system at Temperley London’s brick-and-mortar stores.

The solution allows for:

  • Sales and order management (manage lead times; support returns; automate replenishments; configure advanced routes like drop-shipping and cross-docks; match supplier invoices/orders)
  • Product management (create and configure product variants; export/import/view current and archived products)
  • Warehouse and inventory management (track stock allocations, availability, and replenishment; sync stock levels between different systems; match leftovers in variants and attributes; overview stock balance; optimize storage)
  • Logistic partnerships enablement and management
  • Accounting, budgeting, and invoicing
  • BI and reporting

Itransition’s team integrated Shopify and Adobe Commerce (Magento) and we’re currently fully moving the solution to Shopify.

Product - Sales integrations

We also integrated the solution with a third-party logistic provider and the warehouse module, as well as the Mintsoft order management software used by the warehouse operator.

Additionally, we customized existing integrations to correctly support returns, tuned them up, and provided support and maintenance for them.

Lead lifecycle

The solution is connected with a third-party product creation and processing system WFX. After the product is developed and created there, it gets to Odoo and then to Shopify where a content manager creates a product page for it. Next, a shipment order is generated and sent to the warehouse system for handling. Once the order is shipped, shipment details are received in Odoo and sent back to Shopify. As soon as data related to the product is updated in Odoo, it’s sold via retail in Shopify. This streamlined process makes order fulfillment and synchronization between the different systems more efficient. During our collaboration, Temperley London has already changed three wholesale service providers, and for two of them, our team developed successful integrations and is currently building an integration for the third one.

The initial migration steps were challenging because the client had issues with data accuracy, so before importing it, we had to perform a significant amount of data cleansing and verification. To guarantee safe data migration, our team has also cleansed data from the financial transactions and archived orders. Additionally, we helped the customer set up the right mapping, establish a structured system for products, and clean incorrect data from other systems. Our team is still tweaking integrations to ensure that every deviation from our standard data quality rules is taken into account. This results in accurate data that can be trusted.

During project implementation, our team had to deal with hundreds of SKUs and color and product options, which resulted in thousands of product configurations.

Products
Products with multiple configurations

There was a non-linear connection between Adobe Commerce (Magento) products, where the same product was presented five times. So our team went through them and created mappings of products in Adobe Commerce (Magento) to the ones in Odoo and the warehouse, including manually mapping data from the three systems to ensure they operate seamlessly together.

Itransition’s team serves as consultants on the project, providing improvement recommendations, optimization and cost reduction roadmaps, add-on request fulfillment, and support of Temperley London’s current operations. We also facilitate the customer’s communications with Odoo and help them select the best licensing plans.

Results

The developed order and inventory management system is a core solution centralizing the whole product lifecycle, from creating to handling and selling. The collaboration with us helped the customer to achieve the following results:

  • 50% costs saved on managing 15,000 products by switching from Prima to Odoo
  • Automated stock replenishments