The Story
Forpi is a company that is dedicated to the distribution of products in different digital channels. The big brands have trusted them to serve as outsourcing of the difficult task of attending sales through B2C and B2B electronic commerce. At the beginning of the project and the creation of the company they wanted to use the hundreds of systems that exist for the management of centralized inventories, product catalogs and centralized order dispatch, or better known in the market PIM, WMS and OMS.
However, one of the most important tasks in Forpi team’s ideology was the ability to sell its allies’ products on all digital channels; since the pandemic, the number of these has grown exponentially. Marketplaces and applications saturated the market in addition to Forpi’s ambition to become a benchmark channel for consumers in Venezuela which made it necessary to manage inventory, price, and very dynamic availability. It was there that the need for a system adapted to all the innovations that its founders were bringing to the table of commerce in their country, began to be glimpsed.
“The main challenge in this project, was to develop several applications that could work well as a standalone app and as part of a whole distributed system working for a common goal. It was nice to see it working after few months…”
– DANIEL ALVAREZ
Solution
After ruling out many market options, it was concluded that in order to manage the dynamism required in the operation that was being planned, 3 vital information control points were needed. Therefore, the decision was to create a suite of applications that were seamlessly integrated; but at the same time autonomous in the information and processes they controlled.
Four fundamental applications were created. Entrepot, Dispatch, Sherlock and Portier (I know we are a success naming our applications). These applications emulate the basic functions of a WMS (Warehouse Management System). PIM (Product Information Management). OMS (Order Management System) and BI (Business Intelligence) to create a distributed system, in the cloud and completely cohesive, in the efforts of distribute products, receive orders and analyze the results in more than 100 digital stores; divided between market places, applications and sites of both B2C and B2B sales types.
All team members interact in their processes respectively. They usege of only a part of the ecosystem and the granularity and independence of each application, makes it easy and agile to maintain all these applications. The teamthat managed by the Portier application, which is responsible for routing each user to the piece of information that they can and should handle. The team is managed by the Portier application, which is responsible of routing each user to the piece of information that they can and should handle.
Main Goals Achieved
- Forpi has a fully customized system, taking best practices from the best tools on the market and adapting to the operational realities of a logistically complex market like Venezuela.
- Thanks to the reservation algorithm and its real-time updating in more than 100 published stores, 1/10 of the originally planned inventory is needed since with such distribution capacity exposure and inventory rotation are maximized.
- Despite managing more than 6 types of digital channels, purchase orders are normalized and homogenized in a single customer service process, making customer service capacity exponential with a reduced team but with more experience and therefore better customer service.
- The interconnection of all systems allows Sherlock, the BI suite, to receive information as soon as events occur and it is possible following good practices in Big Data management, to analyze and react practically in real time to market movements.
- Thanks to the information and dynamism of the markets, we have been able to venture into the development of artificial intelligence models to help to manage optimal prices and promotions for each product in each available sales channel.
- The entire suite was integrated and connected to the systems in use, therefore those systems that did work for the operation were not discarded or replaced, but integrated into an even more extensive and intelligent suite.
