A satisfied customer is our best reward

In 2012, an experienced freediving instructor and an MBA graduate joined forces to start Freediving Planet, one of the first freediving schools in Asia. While they pursued their passion for training students and discovering the underwater world, we took care of their inventory management and accounting needs.

About the founders

The one thing that truly binds Jean-Pol (JP) and Suzanne (Suzy) together is their unparalleled love for adventure. JP has more than 25 years of experience in freediving. Before moving to the Philippines, he freedived in different parts of Europe. Being one of the first AIDA instructor trainers in Asia and having travelled across the globe, he is often refered to as "The Godfather" by his colleagues.

Suzy had a different start. After completing her Ph.D. in Pharmaceutics and Biotechnology, she armed herself with an MBA to hone her business skills. To get closer to the ocean's inhabitants, she became a certified scuba diver in 2010. In addition to being a freediving master instructor, she is also a part of Ocean conservation project.

Creating Waves

Freediving Planet offers diving courses ranging from beginner to instructor level. Their courses are certified by AIDA, an international association established to set safety standards for freediving, and PADI a leading training agency for scuba diving since 1966. In addition to the regular course levels, Freediving Planet offers courses designed for total novices and 'Mermaid' courses for those who fancy exploring the ocean with a mermaid tail. But they're not finished adding offerings yet; they have big plans to expand the scope of their business in the near future.

What do they love about Zoho Inventory?

• Easy and user-friendly inventory management application
• Seamless integration with Zoho Books for accounting
• Efficient order tracking and time-saving data management

Moving away from spreadsheets

"We knew that to be more efficient and save time, we had to go for an official programme that could help to organize the customers, organize the stock and invoices, and also keep track of all the accounting. Zoho met all the requirements."

Freediving Planet used to manage all of their data using multiple spreadsheets. They were using one spreadsheet to track cash, one for stock, and another to manage bank accounts. In order to record one transaction, they had to open multiple spreadsheets and update the information in each one. Because the spreadsheets were designed with the help of macros, it was difficult to look at them and understand what was happening.

Finding Zoho Inventory

"When Suzy was looking for a program, Zoho was the one that was able to track inventory, track cash flow with the help of Zoho Books, invoice the customers and manage orders with our vendors."

Suzy and JP started researching online to find the right software for managing their inventory. It didn't take them much time to discover Zoho, which had been named among the Best inventory management software products of 2018 by PC Mag India.

Sailing towards calm water

The case-study-main pain-point for the Freediving Planet team was, updating their data in multiple spreadsheets and then trying to understand how it all came together. This would not only took a lot of time, but invariably delayed their business decisions. And if they accidentally missed an entry in one of their spreadsheets, their entire reporting system would go haywire, and finding the error usually proved to be a lengthy task.

Zoho Inventory made things easy by not only helping them organizing the data, but also updating it in each of the relevant places once the transaction was recorded. This helped them to focus more on their business and customers instead of their record-keeping.

What's ahead for Freediving Planet?

Going forward, JP and Suzy plan to expand the catalogue of products in their e-shop. With a streamlined inventory system, they can offer more Freediving Planet merchandise for sale without adding to their workload.

"After so much research we found that Zoho was the best. It works very well for us and the customer support is outstanding! We're very happy."

Meet Azole Rasayanas

Meet Azole Rasayanas, a growing fine chemicals dealership from the city of pearls, Hyderabad of India. This 4+ year old company is run by Mr.Venkateswara Rao, a veteran of fine chemicals & catalogue products with decades of industry experience under his belt, and a team comprised of like minded industry professionals. They outfit the chemical needs of several industries and institutions in and around Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Their customers include pharmaceutical companies, agrochemical firms, academic groups, chemists and biotechnology companies. Their inventory extends beyond 900 industry specific and mission critical items. Backed by a network of suppliers as well as local and global manufacturers, Azole Rasayanas ensures shorter order turn around times and faster deliveries to their customers. We interviewed Mr. Venkateswara Rao and his team at Azole Rasayanas to understand what their industry is all about, and how Zoho Inventory and Books fit in with their operations.

Before Zoho

"Being a fine chemical dealer is tough. It's a business that's all about timing and accuracy. Customers need the right supplies on time, and it has to be in the right concentrations, at the right temperatures and in right quantities. We take this very seriously, since the success rate of their projects may very well depend on how well we do our jobs." says Mr. Rao.

Before they adopted cloud applications from Zoho, they were initially using Tally with only two of their team members taking care of the back end accounting processes. And, they had to rely on other stand alone tools for stock keeping. Their accounting and inventory did not talk to each other, and both of these elements were maintained in a dis-fragmented manner. Owing to this, they were unable to track their inventory levels, generate landed cost summaries, or monitor item reorder levels. All they had was a rough estimate of inventory and they had to take stock manually from time to time.

This meant, a substantial amount of manually coordinated efforts were needed between Azole's warehouse team and sales team when fulfilling an order. Also, they had to manually ensure the quality of every product sold and its validity since the old system had no means of tracking expiration dates or FIFO to understand what came when, and before what.

After Zoho

They were on the lookout for a suitable solution before they ran into Mr. Gopi Polasani of ZYENAC, a Zoho Partner in India who studied their workflows and suggested Zoho Inventory and Zoho Books. The Azole Rasayanas team gave it a shot and were quite impressed with how easily they were able to setup and apply these tools to compliment their workflows. And so, they migrated their inventory and accounting into Zoho in the month of February, 2019.

Upon implementing a combination of Zoho Inventory and Zoho Books, they have complete visibility of their stock flow and cash flow, right from when an item enters their warehouse to the final point of sale. Using Zoho Inventory they have organized all their products and variants under item groups and categories across all their business locations, while having Zoho Books account for their income and expenses, as well as their GST reporting and filing, whenever they buy or sell chemicals

They are now able to track chemical components and substances in batches and accurately monitor their expiration dates. According to the team, they were also able to combine different components in form of a simple formula or bundling blue-print that can represent finished products or reagents using composite items inside Zoho Inventory.

Being mounted on the cloud, more than 50% of their workforce now have ready access to product and client information, which in turn has brought down the amount of manual intervention required as well as their average order turnaround time by a significant margin. The inbuilt stock and payment reminders have helped them ensure that they are ahead of their customer and vendor balances while also avoiding stock out situations.

Final thoughts

Zoho Inventory and Zoho Books are excellent tools for SMBs who are fine chemical dealers like Azole Rasayanas. The seamless combination of online inventory management and GST compliant cloud accounting has made it easy for them to source, store, bundle and sell chemicals all over the country. The ability to quickly look up the status of items, orders and reorders, process deliveries, and handle customer grievances and refunds using Zoho Inventory has helped further strengthen their bonds with customers and vendors alike. And when it comes to filing GST returns or audits, Zoho Books compiles the necessary reports that can be filed directly into the GST portal after being reviewed by their accountant.

Mr.Rao and his team genuinely feel that migrating to Zoho has indeed given them a decisive edge over the competition, as their workflows are now more simple and streamlined than ever. Should they ever run into problems or have questions at any point, they know fully well that they can count on both the in-house support team, as well as the local Zoho partner on the field for immediate assistance. They are very much looking forward to scaling up and running their whole business on Zoho in the near future.

Element packaging, filling in the gaps worldwide.

Element Packaging, led by Adam Petyt, manufactures and distributes biodegradable and compostable, environmentally friendly packaging products. They have a huge presence in the UK and European markets, and have recently expanded their business into a few Southeast Asian countries and the Caribbean. While the company's main footprint is in the B2B market currently, a good number of their orders are coming from the online retail market as well. Moving to a scalable solution like Zoho has helped the Element Packaging team grow substantially and efficiently over the last three years.

Boxed in by fragmented systems.

Initially, when the company was in the growing stage, it was quite easy for them to handle the shipments and stock details for their UK warehouse using Excel spreadsheets. As they started expanding their operations, they opted for QuickBooks for their accounting system. However, its lack of inventory and order management capabilities meant that they had to supplement it with stand-alone applications, connected with third-party connectors like Zapier. The data flow was not really seamless, though, and there were serious issues with their inventory management, such as gaps between their accounting and physical inventory. The Element team also found it quite difficult to accept online orders and feed them manually into their accounting system. Some other major issues that the team faced include tracking shipped packages and order handling. They needed to keep their customers updated with the shipment details, maintain warehouse-based stock updates, and provide live order statuses for the sales team, among other tasks.

Looking outside the box for the right solution.

Adam and his team discovered Zoho Inventory while looking for a scalable and easy-to-implement inventory management system. They signed up for a free trial and found that Zoho Inventory solves a lot of their issues with inventory management, warehousing, order management, online Shopify store integration, and shipment tracking. The Element field sales team is now using the Zoho Inventory mobile app to check for current stock availability and punch in their sales orders on the go. The Shopify integration helps them bring all the online sales transactions from their Shopify store in to Zoho Inventory, further increasing the communication between their website and inventory system. Shipments are now generated using the shipping integrations and manual shipping options in Zoho Inventory, and tracking information is available using the AfterShip tracking integration. The Zoho Analytics integration within Zoho Inventory helps the team create powerful BI reports based on the data from all of their integrated platforms.

The inventory system is now well integrated with Zoho Books for seamless handling of accounting data. This helps Element ensure that no orders are missed and that accounting is centralized for the company. Thanks to automation, they can now completely avoid manually entering accounting data as well.

Putting it all together.

Deploying Zoho Inventory in their organization has helped the accounts team stay well-informed about the inventory team's work and the orders that come in. Shopify orders from their online sales platform now flow into Zoho Inventory automatically, eliminating the need to feed in orders manually. With these new workflows, the warehouse management teams and front-end teams now collaborate seamlessly using the cloud-hosted mobile and web apps. Orders created by the sales team on the go via the mobile apps are now being immediately processed by the operations team, improving operational visibility and order turnaround time. Shipment tracking and automatic notifications have made customers happier, resulting in better engagement scores and an easier job for the customer success team. The gaps between the inventory and accounting systems have been resolved, and with payment status being updated in real time, there are no disparities there either.

The fabulous customer support that Element Packaging has received from the Zoho Inventory team encourages them to keep scaling higher. Adam and his team are now exploring Zoho CRM and many other apps in the Zoho portfolio and hoping to move further towards a unified business management experience for their company.

The Company

Scientific advancements and controlled legalization for hemp products have unlocked amazing growth opportunities in sectors as different as food, clothing, medicine, and retail. This is very visible in countries like the US, Canada, the Netherlands, and Australia, where jobs in the cannabis industry have grown by 76% since 2017.

In 2013, looking at the huge opportunity in this 4.7 billion USD sector, seven friends from the city of Mumbai, the business capital of India, looked to start their own company. Their aim was to win Indian customers who had not been able to enjoy quality hemp products in their home market. The crew wanted to follow its roots in their city, so they named themselves the Bombay Hemp Company, or BOHECO for short. They embedded their vision for the company in their tag line: "Educate. Cultivate. Elevate."

BOHECO rose to the challenge to achieve a competitive position in the hemp market. Offering better quality and reliability compared to its competition, the company has gained a great deal of attention in the home market as well as the Middle East and Australia.

The Challenge

As part of their growth strategy, they diversified their business with multiple revenue streams in medicine, nutritional super foods, apparel, and clothing. Their sales, fuelled by the growth in their markets, tested their efficiency and prompted them to look out for a solution that they could use to control all of their inventory and order processes in a single place.

Ashish Verma, their head of logistics, started exploring alternatives to their current inventory software, Browntape. As exports increased, the team had to make sure their shipments were always on time, and tracking order efficiency became vital. To solve their problems, they needed an omni channel solution that could be run from a single interface. They wanted to manage their inventory in a way that connected directly with their online store, a large revenue source for them. At the same time, Ashish had to make sure that their new solution could manage online orders alongside wholesale orders so that nothing was missed during inventory audits.

The Solution

When comparing solutions, Zoho Inventory turned out to be the right fit due to its multiple features like remote stock and data accessibility, live order status updates, shipment tracking, warehouse management, online store integrations etc. Within a few weeks, Ashish and his team were able to consolidate their inventory information into a single system at Zoho. Online, wholesale, and retail orders could all be tracked right from the app. A team from internal operations could easily double-check orders to ensure a better shopping experience for their customers, and the logistics department was able to use the Aftership integration to ensure that these orders were dispatched and tracked on time with live updates till delivery. Invoices and delivery challans could also be directly linked and generated from the app, which was an added advantage.

At first, migrating was an intimidating prospect because of how data had been organized in their previous system. Luckily, moving into the Zoho environment was not as difficult as they imagined. Ashish's team, with the help of Zoho's support and their logistics departments, were able to quickly work on the solutions and customizations as needed. This new system went live in less than a week, including setup, alpha testing, beta testing, break testing, and integration testing. In addition to receiving centralized inventory updates, the integration with their three different Shopify stores fell into place as well.

"This COVID-19 situation would have been a real problem for us if we had not made the Zoho decision a few months earlier. It would have gone haywire if we tried to manage our logistics team remotely without such detailed overviews and insights on orders and stock details."
  - Ashish Verma, Head of Logistics, BOHECO

Benefits and ROI

The company and their staff can now collaborate at a higher level than expected. The adoption of Zoho Inventory helped them streamline their warehouse operations as the COVID-19 pandemic hit the city. With regular status details, notifications, and a preset SOP, the operations team was able to work completely separate from the logistics planning team while still maintaining their operational efficiency. They didn't have to worry about data transparency as every user had their designated roles with specific permissions assigned to them. Managing online orders became fairly easy with the orders and inventory updates happening periodically between the stores and Zoho Inventory.

The expansion across the globe has given them a wonderful opportunity in the international community. The team is working hard to meet customer expectations as the demand for their premium quality offerings increase online and amongst their partner outlets in major cities across India and abroad.

Looking forward

Ashish and his operations team are also exploring Zoho CRM and Zoho Books to further align their operations with the Zoho suite. The team at BOHECO feels that Zoho, with their excellent customer support and guidance, would be the best scalable platform for them to grow with over the next several years.

A group of friends, passionate about sailing, living in the same city. That's how Quebec's Voiles Max Marine started. Now, they've been helping others set sail for a little more than a decade under the leadership of Maxime Loiselle, a naval architect by profession. Hundreds of hours of navigation expertise and a passion for the sport of wind inspired them to start their own sail shop. With all this expertise, starting a company in the same domain was a no brainer, but creating efficient planning and business processes took practice.

The Company

The team at Voiles Max Marine focuses on manufacturing and repairing marine sports activity equipment in and around Canada. They deal with equipment like surfing kites, boards, wind surfing sails, masts, sail boats, and anything else that surrounds the sport of sailing. Selling spare parts for many different types of sail boats has become one of their major sources of business. Customers often visit their showroom to see and purchase the variety of sails they deal with and get quality work they can rely on.

The Challenge

With over 3,000 items and SKU's in their warehouse, they faced mounting constraints with the customized software that they were using. It was complicated and was time-consuming, especially with all the different items that had very similar names. After the initial software was developed and deployed, they required several advances and upgrades, which always involved costly fees, as it was custom-built for them. They were ready for a change and looking for something that was simple to use, easy to understand, and offered a refreshing user experience, so that even seasonal employees could quickly learn it.

The Solution

While they were searching for a new software to manage their inventory, a partner of Mr. Maxime visited him in the shop. During conversation, the partner opened his phone and checked his inventory availability, which surprised Mr. Maxime. This piqued his curiosity, so he researched more about Zoho Inventory. After a comparison of the available options in the market, their final decision was to switch to Zoho Inventory.

Some of the advantages he found that encouraged them to switch include:

• Web-based software, no need to install
• Easily accessible from anywhere
• User friendly
• Easy adoption
• Customizable to their needs
• Excellent support

The operations manager, Mr. Francois Farineau, says, "It was very user friendly. It took me just a few days to get accustomed to the software. It's really, really easy."

During the early days, the founder wasn't sure what the company would need, but he was felt reassured that, with a suite of 40 different products, Zoho's tools could help him run and scale the company more efficiently.

Mr. Maxime Loiselle says, "When we started at the beginning with Zoho Inventory, it was pretty easy. It's like plug and play."

Venturing Into Other Zoho Products

After using Zoho Inventory for less than six months, the company had boosted their sales. They decided to try Zoho Books next. They were impressed with the all-in-one accounting software, as well as the seamless integration between Zoho Inventory and Zoho Books.

To get more detailed data on their sales operations and simplify different functions into a single operating system, they tried Zoho CRM. Currently, the company is performing basic functions using Zoho CRM, but they're confident that it will help them scale their business.

Mr. Maxime Loiselle says, "It didn't even take half an hour to transfer data from Zoho Inventory to Zoho Books when setting up the integration."

The smooth integration between inventory management and accounting was one of the key factors for Mr. Maxime to invest more in Zoho products, as it reduces the work involved in running the business. So far, the team is enjoying the customer support and frequent feature additions from the Zoho Inventory team.

Looking Forward

Now happy users of Zoho Inventory, Zoho Books, and Zoho CRM, the team is excited to explore the other products and is confident they can count on Zoho when searching for business solutions in the future. The scalability is something they very much look forward to, as their teams and the business continue to grow.