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How Re-feel uses exactllyERP to bring visibility and control across a 50,000+ SKU operation
Re-feel manufactures and distributes trophies, awards, mementos and related products across more than 50,000 SKUs. In over five years with Exactlly, the way management sees the business, the way production is planned, the way customers check prices and the way orders move from picking to dispatch have all changed.
Customer Proof
A 50,000+ SKU business where information has to move as fast as products
Re-feel manufactures and distributes trophies, awards, mementos and related products.
What 50,000 SKUs actually costs you
Re-feel is an India-based business that both makes and moves its own catalogue, and that catalogue runs to more than 50,000 SKUs.
That figure is the operating problem in one number. A catalogue of that size is not simply a longer list. Every additional SKU is another item to plan raw material for, another thing to make or hold, another line a customer can ask the price of, another product a picker can pull the wrong version of, and another row that has to be correct when the order goes out of the door.
It also turns information into a logistics problem of its own. A business this wide only works if the right people can see the right position quickly: management across the whole business, each department in its own area, and customers on price and availability. When any of those depend on someone stopping what they are doing to go and look something up, the operation slows to the speed of that lookup.
Re-feel at a glance
Re-feel has used Exactlly for more than five years. exactllyERP runs the operation and exactllyBI is part of the same environment. Management works from the Intelligence Platform.
What follows is the customer's own account. Alkesh Agarwal, Re-feel's CEO, set out what the business could not do easily before exactllyERP, and what changed afterwards, area by area. Nearly every claim on this page comes from that description rather than from an outside reading of the business.
Dealer and distributor ordering and Banking API integration are part of the same environment.
- Customer
- Re-feel
- Business
- Trophies, awards, mementos and related products
- Operation
- Manufacturing and distribution
- Location
- India
- Catalogue
- More than 50,000 SKUs
- Exactlly relationship
- More than 5 years
- Products
- exactllyERP and exactllyBI
- Management reporting
- Intelligence Platform
- Customer access
- Web application for price and availability
- Ordering
- Dealer and distributor ordering
- Integration
- Banking API
Five problems, five responses
Five separate areas of the operation, each with what it looked like before and what changed.
- Management Before No real-time 360° view With Exactlly Intelligence Platform visibility
- Departments Before Granular information depended on ERP or accounting knowledge With Exactlly Relevant information reaches departments more directly
- Production Before High manual planning effort With Exactlly Raw-material and manpower planning support
- Customer access Before Calls for price and availability With Exactlly Real-time customer self-service
- Order & dispatch Before Multiple handoffs and manual-error risk With Exactlly Multi-layer processing, scanning and validation
These five areas run alongside one another. None of them waits for another to finish.
How does Re-feel get a real-time 360° view of the business?
Management works from the Intelligence Platform, which gives a real-time 360° view of the business.
Before
No single, real-time 360° view of the business for faster decision-making.
With Exactlly
The Intelligence Platform gives management a real-time 360° view.
And information that reaches departments directly
The CEO describes the Intelligence Platform as one of the biggest additions Re-feel has made. For management, the change is not more reporting. It is that the position of the business is available in real time rather than assembled on request.
The second change sits underneath it. Individual departments can now receive relevant, granular information without needing to log into the ERP or hold accounting knowledge. That is a different thing from giving everyone access to everything. The point is narrower and more useful: the information a department actually needs reaches it, in a form it can use, without a detour through someone who knows the system.
For a business carrying more than 50,000 SKUs, that distinction is the difference between information being available and information being reachable.
How does exactllyERP help Re-feel plan production?
Production automation helps Re-feel analyse raw-material requirements, plan production and allocate manpower more efficiently.
Less of the planning done by hand
Before exactllyERP, production planning involved substantial manual effort, and the heaviest parts of it were working out raw-material requirements and allocating manpower.
Those are the two questions that get harder as a catalogue grows. Raw-material requirements across tens of thousands of SKUs are not difficult in principle and are very difficult in practice, because the work scales with the number of things being made. Manpower allocation has the same shape: the judgement is straightforward, and doing it repeatedly by hand is what costs the time.
The effect the customer describes is less manual planning effort and better planning, rather than planning being taken out of anyone's hands.
How can Re-feel customers check prices and product availability themselves?
A customer-facing web application provides real-time pricing and real-time product availability, with voice support in multiple languages.
The question that used to require a phone call
Before, customers depended on the Re-feel team to check product prices and availability, leading to frequent calls and back-and-forth.
The web application gives customers more convenient access to routine price and availability information, and reduces their dependency on the Re-feel team for these checks.
How does Re-feel process one order across multiple pickers?
Multi-layer order processing allows the same order to be assigned across multiple lifters and pickers, which has significantly improved processing speed.
One order, more than one pair of hands
Order processing previously involved multiple stages and people, making speed, coordination and accuracy a challenge. The customer describes the change in processing speed as significant.
How does Re-feel reduce picking and dispatch errors?
Scanning and validation happen at different stages, through to dispatch.
Checks placed along the route, not only at the end
Dispatch errors could previously occur because picking, checking and movement of material involved manual steps.
The customer says these controls have helped the business move towards near-zero order and dispatch errors.
How has location-wise accounting changed?
Location-wise accounting has become much more streamlined, with better speed, accuracy and visibility.
The same work, with less of the friction
Managing accounting across multiple locations used to be time-consuming, and the customer was explicit that it needed better speed, accuracy and control than it had.
The improvement the customer describes is operational rather than structural. How the business is set up did not change; the accounting work across its locations did.
Business outcomes
What the business has, described as the customer described it.
Visibility
- A real-time 360° view of the business for management
- Relevant, granular information reaching departments directly
- Better visibility in location-wise accounting
Speed
- Significantly improved order-processing speed
- More streamlined location-wise accounting
- Customers answered without waiting for the team
Accuracy and control
- Scanning and validation at different stages through dispatch
- Movement towards near-zero order and dispatch errors
- Better accuracy in location-wise accounting
Operational efficiency
- Raw-material requirement analysis and better production planning
- More efficient manpower allocation
- Less dependency on staff for routine customer checks
Proof at a glance
The customer
- Re-feel
- Trophies, awards and mementos
- India
The operation
- Manufacturing and distribution
- More than 50,000 SKUs
- Dealer and distributor ordering
The environment
- exactllyERP
- exactllyBI
- Banking API integration
The relationship
- More than 5 years
- Intelligence Platform for management
- Customer web application
Related Exactlly capabilities
The products and the industry behind this story.
In the customer's words
What has stood out for us with exactllyERP is not just the product, but the team's ability to understand real business challenges, break them down and come back with practical solutions quickly. Over time, this has helped us improve visibility, accuracy and efficiency across several areas of the business. The Intelligence Platform, in particular, has been a very valuable addition for management decision-making.
Managing thousands of products across production, orders and dispatch?
If a wide catalogue is making it hard to see the position, plan the work and get orders out accurately, talk to Exactlly about what an ERP has to do to keep up.