Achieving Over 95% Stock Accuracy with Anchanto Solutions

Grand Meltique Food Trading Sdn Bhd is a leading Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) distribution company specializing in food import distribution, business-to-business supplies, and event catering. Their customers include Japanese cuisine caterers, Korean restaurants, hotels, frozen retailer shops, giant supermarkets, Chinese restaurants, snack shops, cafes, steamboat restaurants, and online sellers.

With the rapid development of Southern Johor Iskandar Malaysia, Grand Meltique invested in an 8100 ft. plant and 20,000 cubic ft. cold storage space to cope with the demand from the growing population in the area. This investment was meant to ensure that there are sufficient stocks and provide customers with a long-term price guarantee.

While the company grew through their investments and evolving market, they struggled with operations internally. As a result, their customer experience, expenses, and overall performance were affected.

Challenges

Grand Meltique encountered different issues while managing inventory and order fulfillment processes on account of their growth. This prevented them from scaling their efforts and achieving their true potential. Here are some of the main challenges the distributor faced:

1. Poor batch and expiry management

Without the right tools and technology to handle their inventory, managing consumable goods based on expiry dates proved tougher than expected as supply increased. This issue led to wastage and high costs associated with returns. Many times, Grand Meltique was unable to keep track of product expiry date and experienced losses as they failed to send out goods for sale before expiration.

2. Difficulty controlling overselling

Overselling was another issue experienced by the distributor, which significantly affected the customer experience of their online shoppers. Several times, Grand Meltique had to cancel orders due to product unavailability, especially during mega sales. Consequently, the company had to spend more time and use inefficient means to fulfill time-sensitive orders.

3. Manual inventory management and inaccurate stock quantities

Grand Meltique used manual processes to manage inventory and orders, which often led to unspecified or multiple stock locations per product due to human carelessness. As a result, finding specific products for order fulfillment took more time. The company also faced the challenge of missing stock in large quantities due to improper inventory management.

4. Delayed inventory updates

For Grand Meltique, their inventory wasn’t instantly updated across sales channels despite using a Multichannel E-commerce Syncing System. As their system took too long to update the marketplaces they used, overselling became unavoidable. Moreover, as inventory updates were delayed, stock replenishment took longer in some cases.

5. Failure to monitor employee work performance

Grand Meltique also lacked the means to track employee work performance. Mapping movements throughout their warehouse and analyzing this data was impossible for the company as everything was managed manually. This made it challenging to determine where pickers spent more time, why, and how that could be reduced.

6. Shortage complications during inbounding

Many times, suppliers would send fewer inventory quantities or wrong items to Grand Meltique. Upon discovering a short shipment, the warehouse operator would need to jot down all the details like the order number, date received, etc. manually. This added to the receiving process, making it longer than necessary.

Implementation

After assessing their systems and operations, Grand Meltique decided it was time to make a major shift. Upon researching the market, they came across Anchanto’s flexible and dynamic SaaS solutions. Unlike their existing system, Anchanto’s technology offered them scalability, real-time integrations, and the capacity to maintain buffer stock which was key to addressing their overselling issue.

The solution from Anchanto also helped them seamlessly manage inbound inventory and optimize the inbound logistics from stock arrivals until put-away.

Grand Meltique’s team received a detailed explanation of how to use Anchanto’s order and inventory solution so they could implement it within a month. After 30 days, the team at Grand Meltique was able to maneuver Anchanto’s modular technology stack effortlessly.

Solutions and Benefits

The results of Anchanto’s technology were beyond expectations for Grand Meltique. From 50% – 60% the company achieved more than 95% stock accuracy through Anchanto’s modular solutions. Additionally, the company was able to increase orders per picker to 300 from 150. This boosted their fulfillment speed and quality of customer experience.

Other major improvements include:

1. Batch-and-expiry management and complete inventory visibility

Anchanto’s software solution provides inventory visibility to all departments involved at Grand Meltique and helps ensure products are being sold within the expiry date and are fit for consumption. It enables the company to keep track of which products are closest to their expiry date and inventory levels throughout the supply chain based on demand.

2. Optimized efficiency and operations cost

Grand Meltique runs a digitized warehouse with the help of Anchanto’s Warehouse Management (WMS) technology stack. It automates their operations like inventory inbounding, outbounding, management of stock ids, product counts, labeling, picking, packing, transferring, updating, replenishing, order processing, fulfilling, billing, and more. By automating these processes, the company is able to reduce errors, simplify inventory handling, prevent overselling, and speed up fulfillment.

The automated inbound process through Anchanto’s WMS also improved their counting and inventory quality control, which helped solve their shortage complications during inbounding.

3. Reduced manpower cost

With the help of the automation and scalable efficiency offered by Anchanto’s solutions, Grand Meltique is now able to manage the sales season rush without additional manpower. The company can also manage more customers and inventory with their existing resources.

4. Effective order management

When it comes to orders, Grand Meltique uses Anchanto’s Order Management solution to synchronize them with available inventory and manage order statuses. Also, in the event of stockouts or low inventory, the SaaS technology stack enables Grand Meltique to fulfill orders partially. That means as soon as their inventory is replenished, all partially fulfilled orders get prioritized to ensure they are completed first.

Conclusion

Having managed to get a hold of their growing B2B and e-commerce operations with the help of revolutionary SaaS technology, the team at Grand Meltique has set their sights on new goals for the future. These include creating and distributing the top ten brands in the country and launching their business across 13 states in Malaysia. Subsequently, the company will introduce and implement omnichannel retail, which will integrate Grand Meltique’s online and offline business.

The distributor plans to use Anchanto’s technology infrastructure to explore these goals. They believe that with Anchanto, their operational efficiency for both the labor and physical space will be improved, and their business will be streamlined to meet SOPs and maximize earnings.