The Closet Lover is a Singapore-based fashion retail outlet started as a blog shop 10 years ago by Brianna and Bertilla Wong. They now run four brick-and-mortar stores in Singapore, and two in Cambodia.
Delivering a Seamlessly Integrated Omnichannel Experience with Workato
Workato’s robust integration capabilities have allowed us to integrate our e-commerce platform, POS, 3PL and last-mile delivery partners with our cloud ERP. This has enabled orders from our customers to be processed immediately by our 3PL partners without any manual intervention from us.
Challenges
- Manually managed disparate data
- Technical heavy lifting needed
- Inflexible technical scripts
The Closet Lover has been an early adopter in embracing cloud technology through an array of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools to address different pain points. However, this soon resulted in an SaaS sprawl where unintegrated systems did not talk to each other and data from disparate sources needed to be managed manually.
With the Covid-19 pandemic further emphasizing the need for an integrated solution, The Closet Lover tried using scripts and coding to integrate its solutions, only to realize this often required a high level of technical understanding from users. It would be difficult and expensive to expect all users to understand and maintain these integrations.
Such coding also proved to be slow and inflexible when the team needed to make changes in a dynamic environment. Any new variable could potentially break the script and require a significant amount of time, effort and money to ensure operations continue smoothly.
Solutions
- Sell, deliver and plan in sync
- Immediate order fulfillment
- Auto-update ERP
For The Closet Lover, its ability to deliver a seamless omnichannel shopping experience relies on having its Point of Sale (POS) system, third-party logistics (3PL) provider and last-mile delivery partner working in sync with its cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.
Glen and team sought a simple platform that could achieve this while requiring little technical knowledge to initiate and innovate. With the help of PointStar Consulting, The Closet Lover placed its bets on Workato’s robust low-code, no-code enterprise integration and automation capabilities.
Workato eliminated the need for any manual intervention by integrating the end-to-end order fulfillment process between The Closet Lovers’ POS, 3PL and cloud ERP. Now, the moment an order is received, their 3PL provider will be able to fulfill it immediately if within working hours, removing any order processing time from The Closet Lover. All orders can be fulfilled within the next or sometimes even the same working day and will reach their delivery partner in less than two working days from order receipt. Every step is also recorded into The Closet Lover’s cloud ERP immediately.
Impact
- 25% increase in customer satisfaction
- 30% drop in excess inventory
- Reliable undisrupted planning
Increased speed and efficiency of fulfillment has contributed to a 25% increase in customer satisfaction.
The Closet Lover also realized a 30% reduction in excess inventory, with the faster turnaround on orders.
Crucially, with Workato taking care of order fulfillments, the company was able to work through shocks like the pandemic without any disruptions to internal logistical planning.